Shifts and Changes: part one, the schedule

I’m always trying to arrive at the Perfect Schedule, just like I am in a life long search for the Perfect Handbag. If you have the right handbag, you can pretty well cope with anything that comes your way, or so I have always, in my heart, believed. So also with the Perfect Schedule. If I could just, you know, juggle things just a little this way or a little that way, we would arrive at a perfect arrangements of events and activities and then we would be perfectly happy. If I had the Perfect Schedule, I would necessarily become Perfectly Happy.

So anyway, don’t tell me how foolish this pursuit is. I justify it by also searching around for God and whatever it is that he might be doing on a given day. But I have so little control over him, whereas I have some sort of control over when I do all the things I think I’m supposed to do. Some control, a very small amount of control, not nearly enough control.

In this quest, though, I’ve learned there are two approaches. There might be more, but whatever, I’m just talking about these two. They are really two opposite points on a continuum and I swing wildly back and forth between them, sometimes in a single day. The first point or approach is What I Think I Ought to be Doing. I need to feed the children regular meals, I need to accomplish school, I need to do laundry. At least more than half the time when and how I do all those things is often determined by a deep sense of Ought developed by a careful study of the Internet and people I generally envy. The other point or approach is What I Will Actually Do. This is much more difficult to discern because what I will actually do is hard to see through the haze of what I think I ought to do.

In moments of true success, I have been able to pause and look around and see that I was driven a little bit forward by What I Ought to Do and was then tempered and settled by What I Actually Do. It’s not bad, I think, to look around and see how you could improve things or work harder or rearrange something after seeing how someone else did it. The question is whether you can actually do and carry out something you essentially impose on yourself from the outside.

Case in point, Matt works out in the morning, and I have always thought this seemed sensible and right. I also should work out in the morning, I think as I make my little week on an index card. Because it’s true, if you don’t do it right away, it hangs over you like the sword of Damocles or whoever that guy was. (I’m probably getting my reference from PG Wodehouse and not, cough, a classical education). So what I’ve been doing is waking up, lying in bed for a couple of hours and then rolling out and lying on the floor watching some horrible cheerful person on YouTube dance around shouting out at me to breathe while other people dance around behind her, all of them grinning garishly like they are having a good time. Then I sort of do a stray sit up and wander away and then wonder why my chronic back pain is still chronic. “What on earth!” I keep whining to myself. “Here I keep working out and nothing’s happening.” Except I’m not working out. The Ought has interfered with the Actually, which is that when I work out in the afternoon, I am actually awake enough to actually do it. So, I need to re juggle my whole carefully arranged system to account for reality.

But once you move one thing you get caught up moving other things. So part two tomorrow.