Time, Attention & Boundaries

Merlin Mann had a wonderful series up recently on making time for creativity. He makes many, many salient points. Although all of his points apply (check it out, it really is that good), one in particular really struck me as oh so appropriate for this particular rant.

“Embrace the disingenuous charge of elitism (or, as I prefer to call it, maturity) by not pretending that everyone is equally “special” to you. …Widen the channels to the people you adore, and never make them suffer [because of] your weird compulsion to wave at strangers.”

Yeah! Exactly! What he said!

At some level this should be a no-brainer. But I often find myself in situations where almost complete strangers demand more of my time and attention than I would actually tolerate from the people I love. Sometimes, they are not complete strangers, but because of the lack of a real and meaningful connection, they come very close to it.

To put it bluntly, I do not have sufficient time in my life to respond to everyone and everything that is screaming for attention. So I prioritize. I am more likely to respond favorably to requests for my time depending on the nature of the request and the level of our prior relationship. Seems pretty simple and straightforward to me.

A few examples might be helpful.

• Scenario 1: A person who has served with me in working groups, teaching teams and conference style discussion panels, calls and asks if I could offer her some career advice. We have a shared history and a friendly relationship. I respond warmly to this request.
• Scenario 2: A person who has taken a few of my classes sends me an email asking me for recommendations for further studies in a specific area. I remember him as a curious but committed student. I search through my referral lists and respond with suggestions.
• Scenario 3: One of my full-time students has an emergency and calls me for support. I cancel what I can of my plans and respond accordingly.
• Scenario 4: A person new to the DC area emails me asking for suggestions for getting involved in the local pagan community. I send him my standard email with helpful links to local sources of info and contact.
• Scenario 5: A community member writes to me and asks when I plan to teach a particular class again. I send them what I know of my upcoming offerings and reassure them of any future plans in that area.
• Scenario 6: A person writes to me asking me to teach/speak/attend an upcoming event. I check my schedule for availability and respond accordingly with either regrets or further questions.
• Scenario 7: A friend or colleague writes to me asking me to teach/speak/attend an upcoming event. I check my schedule for availability (possibly rearranging what I can) and respond accordingly with either regrets or further questions.

What these scenarios have in common is that the nature of the request is inline with the nature of our relationship.

But in contrast, consider the following scenarios.

• Scenario A: A stranger writes to me asking me to be their priestess/teacher/mentor/whatever. If I do not get an “uncomfortable” vibe from the note, I send them a link to Reflections, Connect DC, my standard spiritual counseling/consulting services list, and, if they mention being local, the standard email with helpful links.
• Scenario B: A community member writes to me asking me to be their priestess/teacher/mentor/whatever. I assume they are aware of my classes, rituals and mystery school.
  1. So if they have attended any of my classes or rituals, I might suggest they consider joining my mystery school. But I also check my calendar and if I can, I offer them a time for a phone chat or and in person meeting to discuss it further.
  2. But if they have not attended ANY (to my knowledge) of my local offerings, I send them my standard spiritual counseling/consulting services list.

And it is this last bit that recently bothered a member of my local community. Both scenario A and B-2 represent requests not in line with the nature of our current relationship. And because of that, I am less inclined to either make time in my already full schedule or offer one-on-one face time w/o some form of payment.

When I reach out to others, I try to be careful when asking for some of their precious time. For example, I am really happy with my current medical doctor, chiropractor, intuitive healer and massage therapist. And I have a warm relationship with every single one of them. But I would not dare just call them up and ask for some of their time without expecting to pay them.

I also have several very close friends who are fairly well known, extremely talented and even busier than I am. And even knowing that they *love* me, I am very careful with taking up too much of their time.

Hell, even in my family we ask, “Is this a good time?” when we call.

I don’t know. Maybe I *could* be a bit more accessible. But then I ask you this? What do I drop to make this a reality? Do I drop the time I dedicate to my full time students and initiates? Do I drop the time I set aside to check in with my colleagues and elders? Do I drop the time I set aside for teaching, counseling and writing? Do I drop the time I set aside for self-care and self-nurturing? Do I drop my business or my plethora of medical appointments? Or do I cease the methodologies and processes that allow me to continue to work while facing several long-term chronic illnesses? Because dropping something currently on my plate is what I would have to do to be more accessible.

The bottom line is this … I am not trying to be elitist or arrogant. I am trying to make sense of an already very full life that has several real physical and energetic limits. So I am truly sorry if the person from B-2 above was disappointed.^{Note 1.} But your potential or very real disappointment is not my metric in deciding how to manage my life.

In my mission statement, I state the following.

My mission is …
To share my gifts.
To actively participate in my own evolution.
To acknowledge divine mystery.
To experience the joy, sweetness and beauty of life.
To be willing to touch and be touched by the journeys of my loved ones.
To be grounded in the present moment with an open heart and mind.
To engage in radical self care.

This is my metric. And this … is my boundary.

Katrina

1. To be truthful, I did offer a free phone call for us to discuss exactly what she was looking for from me. But I suspect that because I listed my prices for spiritual counseling and consults, she was disinclined to go further.

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And Finally, A Dialogue

This is part five, the last part in fact, of an exploration into how I navigated a recent difficult period. The first in this series is, Distorted Nostalgia.

Dream: Walking a path underground that I usually walk above ground. I get lost at some point. So I come up but nothing is familiar. So I retreat underground trying different options. I think I run into this man who I am sure is not to be trusted.

I begin thinking about the beginning of this disease (CFIDS) and the kind of stress I was under at that time. And although I am not under anything close to that level of stress, it feels/felt like it.

My dreams point to my walking in the dark of the unconscious where I normally am aware and conscious. And thus when I finally come up – I am lost. And being in unfamiliar ground, I retreat into the unconscious.

So where am I, really. I hastily write out a list of all that is on my plate. As I survey the list, I notice two things. First, no wonder I feel so stressed. And secondly, it is all doable. I note the conflict between these two views.

“Who is that? Doable based on what? How do you get the idea that I can do all of this?”

“I just know … we, I mean , I can pull this off … if …”

If what? Nothing else explodes? Nothing else happens unexpectedly? No surprises? No disasters? What?

… if we, I mean I just do it …”

Just do what?

It ... y’know .. get to work …

That m’dear is a lie! It is not going to happen. I cannot just get to work! I am working as hard as I can already. I cannot just work even harder!

Why not? It is what we, I always do!

Yeah, but at what cost?

Then, then … I will have to let something go … so smarty pants, what do I let go?

Oh, this is painful! I do not want to let anything go.

So we are at an impasse then?

No. We are in the midst of a dilemma. We have a lot (some would say too much) on our plate. But we truthfully cannot bear to drop any of it. So we have a dilemma. What this calls for is creativity, not hard work. We/I already work hard, and so more hard work may not be the answer.

Because of the cost yes, but also we will learn nothing from it. And learning is my/our prime motivator.

And at that moment, my entire internal chorus finally reached an agreement. I had found my way back to my passion. Learning something new was something all parts of myself were keen about. So I hastily wrote down some ideas on approaching this issue. None seemed to fill the bill. So I took a break for lunch. As I munched on romaine and grilled chicken, something caught my eye on my list of projects. And then another item caught my eye, then another. I picked up my pen and some scratch paper … at the end I had a new view. I had laid out the original list into groups. Some had relationships between them which I noted by connecting lines and some had a natural hierarchy. By the time I finished, I suddenly understood the big picture in a way I hadn’t before. And I discovered something surprising!

Apparently, it was all doable. But what was required was not more hard work. What I needed, most of all, was space. I needed more air. I was too close to the work.

An air person needed more air. Aha! I was underground where I should have been above ground. I began laughing out loud. I was in my shadow element, I was ensconced in earth. Not the healthy earth of a balanced earth person, but the shadowy earth of an air person.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Who would of thunk it? Air!

Two weeks later …

I am still under a lot of stress, but it all seems lighter somehow. Like before, I am getting a lot done and some days are harder than others. But I am not burning my self out nor escaping into ice cream – my drug of choice. I am sleeping better and taking plenty of breaks.

It still cracks me up, that all I needed was some perspective. I needed to spread my wings, lift off and gaze at it all from thirty thousand feet.

Blessings from a Bateleur Eagle,
Katrina

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Distorted Nostalgia

I have been really busy with my business lately. Almost all of my time has been spent doing web design. I have paying clients and a ton of new design work on my plate. Almost half involves me learning how to do new stuff, which is exciting. But at the same time, I found myself stressed beyond all reason with the enormity of it all. I also had this nagging feeling that I was falling hopelessly behind in everything else.

And if that was not enough, I also kept beating myself up for being stressed out. Geez, maybe I would not be so stressed, if I wasn’t also stressing about how stressed out I felt.

My next few blog entries will explore my process for getting through this difficult period.

This first one follows weeks of waking up to a mental list of everything on my plate. Sometimes I woke up with a new algorithm or a new code fragment, but after a while the message was often just “… gotta go, gotta go, now, now, now ….” And throughout this entire period, I felt this deep regret at not living up to some past level of true efficiency.

... from my journal ...

Woke up thinking about coding again or at least that is what intruded immediately to my waking mind. But I somehow knew that I had not been dreaming of code, so I settled back to sleep after my bathroom run intentional walk. And slowly an image began to emerge.

The nostalgic car is impractical and impossible to maintain. So whatever I am imagining of my old ways of handling things is not only distorted it is non-sustainable.

After my chiro visit, I sat with my journal in my favorite haunt and pondered the meaning of my morning images.

I remembered hearing myself arguing with myself the day before…

“Ivo has a business along with all his teaching and counseling.”

“But I am not Ivo. He is healthy and still he works really hard at keeping up with it all. Plus his store has staff and a kick ass manager. And he lives with all these incredibly talented and dedicated people who are also pulling long hours”

And.

“I like having real deadlines to work toward.”

“But not if it means nothing moves forward for me personally. And the reasons these deadlines are real are because it involves someone other than you. What does that say about your commitment to achieving your own personal goals, aspirations and dreams?”

Later that same day, my healer elder said that I needed to listen to my water self during this fiery period. Which is interesting because in my system of elemental classification, my water self is also my child. So in effect she was once again calling attention to my child self.

I decided to listen to what all the parts were saying:

Parent/Fire
“You gotta work hard and keep commitments to get ahead in this world. All this lollygagging is getting you nowhere. Get busy, time is money.”

Child/Water
“I am tired of all this work. I need more down time, more rest. Even my playtime is filled with, ‘Do this! Do that!’ I can never have time just for me.”

Adult/Air
“ I am out of balance. Yes, there is a lot on my plate but the way we handle this is by getting enough down time, rest, good food, and by focusing on home and hearth. And of course taking care of my physical self. This is not the time to walk away from Radical Self Care.”

Beloved/Shadow/Earth
“Naptime!”

So I decided to take an afternoon nap. I also spent the rest of the day relaxing and watching some of my favorite TV shows. I think I also made myself a chocolate sundae.

Next time, the morning after…

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Long Term Goals

This is the third part of my series on Productivity. To start at the beginning, you can begin here.

So after reviewing and updating my mission, my next step was my long-term goals.

I have a file that includes my long-term goals going back at least two decades. Why? Because it helps me to see how my goals have morphed and changed over the years. It helped me to realize what has withstood the test of time and what was just a momentary glitch. Now I have a better feel for what is my goal and what is my response to someone else’s agenda.

LONG TERM GOALS
• My life has room for my chosen family
• Financial independence
• Innovative and successful software solutions business
• Beautiful, welcoming and nurturing home
• Pagan monastery and temple
• Spiritual, sustainable and healthy lifestyle
• Share my writings, music, art and message with a wider audience

Over the next week or so, I am going to write more about each of these goals and share my annual goals under each of them. My plan is to publicly commit to these annual goals and to review my progress toward completing them throughout the year. We will see what actually happens. One thing I already know is that I need to work on the wording for my long-term goals. Since I usually review them every quarter, I may just wait till the next review to modify them. We will see how that works out.

I am a little nervous about exposing my inner working and my fear about being judged negatively by others is raising its head as well. But I think that this process can be helpful for me even if no one else finds it interesting or helpful. Although admittedly, I do hope others will not only join my journey but also participate in the ongoing discussion. And of course, I definitely welcome suggestions and advice all along the way.

And so I welcome all of you to join me, because … now begins our journey.

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