Day 155: Drill

Posted on June 5, 2014 by joshdaddy

It’s pretty easy to be fully in the moment and brimming with mindfulness while sitting on a hilltop, watching a sunset, but what about in the dentist’s office having a tooth filled?

I had a dentist’s appointment today–the second of two to have a couple of fillings put in. You know what it’s like (unless you are one of the lucky few with perfect teeth). There you are, stretched out on your back, with two sets of hands and a half dozen tools poking out of your mouth. It’s not exactly a pleasant experience.

But can I be mindful and present in the midst of the unpleasant as well as the pleasant? As bizarre and yucky as it sounds, that’s what I tried to do during my visit today.

Sure, it’s normal to want to “check out” when we are confronting emotional or physical pain–but there is something to be said about remaining in the present, even while suffering.

Now granted, I might have had a very different experience if I had been facing intense pain and suffering today, but in truth: I had the benefit of an anesthetic to block the pain. All I really had to deal with was the sound and smell of the drill, the feeling of the suction in my mouth, the spray of water….

OK, I won’t go on, but you have the idea.

And it wasn’t easy. I would be there, right in the experience, and then I would drift away and start thinking about what I had to do at work later in the day, or what was the next thing I needed to do to get the house ready to sell, or what I would write on this blog about this experience.

And so on.

It may not be pleasant, but there is something to be gained in drilling on this lesson (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun) in all life’s circumstances, even the ones that bring us discomfort or suffering.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Day 154: Sweeten

Posted on June 4, 2014 by joshdaddy

So tonight’s posting is another redirection of sorts. I was all ready to write up something about how I had finally started loading boxes and bookshelves into The Pod, in preparation for the move, but then I got to thinking: What the heck does that have to do with trying to live more simply and deliberately?

Instead, I’m following up on what I was trying to learn yesterday–but maybe coming at it from a different direction.

I’m sure I’ve written before about how I tend to push myself too hard and not get enough sleep. I get a lot done in the short-term, no doubt, but there’s a cumulative effect: I start acting like a three-year-old in need of a nap.

While making dinner tonight, I started to notice the warning signs: little things were beginning to annoy me, simple questions felt like huge demands, and I could feel a tightness creeping up into my shoulders and neck.

And when I did notice my souring mood, I decided to try something different. I decided to sweeten up.

I’m not talking about “faking it”; I’m talking about making a conscious decision to make my interactions with my family just a little more light, playful, and loving.

And it wasn’t that hard to do.

And not only did my family appreciate my change in mood; so did I.

And I made a pie for dessert, which is always a good thing.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Day 153: Learn

Posted on June 3, 2014 by joshdaddy

So today The Pods arrived, which was a bit of a surprise, since I had arranged for only one pod to arrive today. The woman driving the truck checked her paperwork, then looked up at me quizzically.

“You only wanted one?”

I explained to her the brilliant solution that I had fallen into the other day, suggested by her company’s customer service agent. I would have one pod arrive today, then when I filled it up, the truck would drop off two empty pods and deliver the filled one to a local storage facility until all three boxes were ready to ship to North Carolina.

She listened to me explain all of this, and then replied:

“Well you know, if we send the truck out a second time, you’re going to get charged a second delivery fee.”

Oh no, I explained. That was the beautiful part. The woman on the phone had reassured me that I wouldn’t have to pay the second delivery charge.

She looked back at me, and didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Let me check with my dispatcher.”

She got on her phone for a few moments and chatted with her dispatcher. When she came back to talk to me she confirmed:

If the truck came twice, I would have to pay for two deliveries.

So…I got a little frustrated. My voice gained an edge. I started asking barbed questions (like: “Why do you suppose your customer service agent would lie to me like that?”) I probably had my arms crossed tightly on my chest the whole conversation.

And the truck driver? She just listened to me. She asked me if I still wanted just one pod delivered now or all three. She assured me that what her dispatcher told her was correct, but I should go ahead and call back customer service.

And then she carried on with doing her job and started to unload the pod.

I went into the house for a little while and started to reflect on what had just happened. I had expected one thing to happen, and something else was happening instead. I was rightfully frustrated, but had started to take it out on the wrong person. And how did that person respond?

Not at all.

She managed to let me vent my emotions without becoming reactive at all. She seemed to get that my emotions had nothing to do with her at all. That’s an amazing skill, and one that I still need to practice often if I am to learn it well.

I went back outside, and the truck driver had just finished setting down the pod with a forklift. I made some small talk with her. We laughed a bit. I apologized for getting frustrated, and she told me she understood.

She obviously did.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Day 152: Retire

Posted on June 1, 2014 by joshdaddy

No, I’m not retiring from my day job, but I do think I’m through with moving sales and yard sales for a while.

Don’t get me wrong: today was sort of fun. I had friends stop by to chat, and I met many new neighbors as well. And I think I did a fairly decent job of staying somewhat disinterested in the whole profit motive for selling all this stuff as well. But as a strategy for shedding what we no longer need… probably not the best way to spend my day.

We did sell off a few chairs, and some of the kids’ toys, and a decent stack of books. But at the end of the day, I was packing up lots of clothing and books and household items to donate to charity… which I could have done in the first place, without having to go through all the bother of holding a moving sale.

We also hauled a bunch of stuff to the curb, having faith in the power of drive-by recycling. It didn’t take long: I was still in the process of bagging up clothing when the rickety, back porch table and chair set was making its way into the back of someone’s pickup truck, along with piles of wicker baskets and various bric-a-brac.

We got rid of more of our unwanted, excess furniture in fifteen minutes on the curb than we did all day at our moving sale.

And even though we probably sold close to 100 books today, I must have dropped off at least twice as many at Dr. Bombay’s later in the evening, and all it took was a ten minute drive.

So maybe in some distant future I will hold a yard sale again, but if I do, I think it will be to hang out with old friends and meet new ones. Until then, I’m retiring.

And speaking of retiring, I think it’s time for me to retire for the day as well–it’s been a long one!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Day 151: Disinvest

Posted on June 1, 2014 by joshdaddy

Somewhere around five o’clock tonight–as I was straddling the intake duct on the heat pump in an attic well over 100 degrees, wrestling with a disassembled, solid oak crib–it dawned on me that (once again), the day had gone somewhat off track.

Tomorrow morning we will have our moving sale. In advance of the sale, I have already sold off an old sleeper sofa and a couple of spare dining room chairs. We have mountains of books and equally impressive piles of clothing we’re trying to get rid of, plus other large pieces of furniture.

The whole point of selling this stuff, as I’ve said before, is to reduce our excess and only hold onto what we really need. But at some point during the day, I could feel that my motives had shifted. Suddenly, tomorrow’s moving sale was all about the profit.

So I started wandering around the house looking for other things that we could sell, rather than looking for things we no longer needed or used that we could finally let go.

And that’s when I remembered the old cribs in the attic–heavy, beautiful pieces, but since I can’t find all the hardware for the two of them, they are probably not items that are going to sell. I did manage to drag out the various pieces without tearing out any duct work or falling through the ceiling, but not before coming to terms with the fact that I needed to be a little less invested in the selling part of this sale. The important part, really, was just letting the stuff go.

A little later this evening, I was catching up on comments on this blog and read a wonderful response to yesterday’s post by an old friend of mine who goes by the name of pencilgrub on WordPress:

My experience after my recent move has been that I am skeptical of many purchases. “Free” is seldom free. And I have become more willing and able to to give things away I no longer value as well as things that, in some other person’s hands, will be more useful.

It was a nice shift in perspective for me: what if I were to view this sale tomorrow not as a means of generating a little extra cash, but rather as a vehicle for moving our unused and unneeded superabundance into the hands of others who might be able to put these goods to better use.

I’m sure it might take some of the fun out of haggling, but my guess is that I will feel doubly satisfied with each sale.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Day 150: Open

Posted on May 31, 2014 by joshdaddy

It’s getting pretty chaotic in the house right now.

I know, I know… we are in process. There are boxes piled up in increasingly precarious towers, and various bags intended for various destinations strewn about the floor, and furniture pulled out of place and double parked against the wall. All of those dedicated spaces I had tried to construct and maintain are, well, coming undone.

And I know it’s going to be that way for a while, as we transition from one home to another (insert caterpillar-dissolves-in-its-chrysalis metaphor here).

But tonight, I had to take a moment to clear away just a little bit of space–restore some semblance of order to the dining room table, open a clear path from one room to the next, so we’re not stumbling over boxes–that sort of thing. There’s no point, with all that is in flux, to try to maintain the illusion that “all is in order”–because right now, all is in motion. But that doesn’t mean I can’t create a small refuge amidst the chaos.

I think that’s all I can do for now to “keep it simple”: to remember that sometimes chaos is part of the process, but to still allow spaces of calm and order to open where they will.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Day 149: Flow

Posted on May 30, 2014 by joshdaddy

OK, it’s a major cliché, and an out of date one at that, but today has been a good reminder of how simple it can be to go with the flow.

I’ve been dithering on The Pods–how many do we need, how long do we keep them on our property, do we load them at our home or at the warehouse, etc. etc. And then the phone rang: it was the Pod People.

They were calling to confirm the delivery date I had given them a few days ago. Instead, we spent the next 15 minutes walking through our moving scenario, and instead of me guessing what was the best solution, I followed the agent’s suggestions.

Next, I sent off an announcement through our town’s electronic bulletin board, advertising our one-and-only Moving Sale. I’ve been rather dubious about this endeavor, thinking it will be more work than it’s worth, and seriously doubting anyone would want to buy our old stuff. Then the emails starting to pour in: “Perfect timing! My daughter is moving into an apartment!”; “We’re in desperate need of kitchen tables!”; “I could really use a sleeper sofa for an extra guest bed!”; and so on.

And finally, I ended the day talking with my realtor and a yard man to figure out what essentials need to be done to the yard (and goodness knows I am not going to have the time to commit to this one chore). I pretty much left it to the two of them to work out. I’m sure I could have drummed up an opinion on what to trim, and how far down, but here were two people who I am sure knew much better than me.

So nothing profound today–just a few reminders of how easy it is to get out of my own way and let things happen in their own course.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Day 148: Compromise

Posted on May 28, 2014 by joshdaddy

IMG_2454My youngest stayed overnight at a friend’s house last night, and then was gone most of the day as well. When she and her mother finally got home this evening, I had already been at work in her bedroom for about an hour. I met her in the kitchen and told her to go upstairs, look around, and say “Oh my gosh!”

I heard her walk upstairs… and then nothing. No sounds of joy or dismay or anything.

After a couple of seconds, I followed her up. At the top of the stairs, I had laid out seven stacks of books from the bookshelf in her room, each stack about a foot high. She was staring at all of the books that I had dragged out of her bedroom with a look on her face somewhere between shock and wonder.

I explained that these books were all the books that I thought she had outgrown–“baby books” as I called them: board books, oversized picture books, level one readers, etc. I reassured her that I had already saved quite a few “good” books, even some picture books, that were still on her shelves in her room, but these stacks were the books we were going to give away.

“So what I want you to do,” I explained, “is to go through these stacks, and any thing you really want to keep we will keep… just no more than seven books, OK?”

And that’s when I got my “Oh my gosh!”

She started pulling out one indispensable title after another, waving them at me accusingly: “I can’t get rid of this one!”; “I love this book!”; and so on.

So I relented and let her sort through the stacks in her own way.

She plowed through those books, pulling out probably a couple of dozen, tossing them into a clothes basket as “keepers.” Then she went back through what she had reserved and tossed back a few into the give-away pile.

Next, I brought her into her room to the shelves of books that I had saved as the “keepers.”

“OK, now look through all of these books, and if you see something that I’m saving that you really just don’t want, toss it to the side.”

And she did. In fact, when all was said and done, she ended up pulling off of the shelves more books than she had saved from the give-away stack–including a few titles that I had declared indispensable. So I let them go.

Well most of them, at least. You can’t blame a parent for sneaking  a couple of those sentimental books back into the “keeper” stack, can you?

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Day 147: Break

Posted on May 28, 2014 by joshdaddy

IMG_2451So it’s summertime around here, by most measures. The kids are out of school, and a lot of our daily schedules are changing. Normally, I’m driving my oldest boy to the gym on Mondays and Wednesdays for his team practice, which means I’m at the gym on these two nights as well, from about 5:30pm to 8:30pm.

But we are in Championship season now, so the kids are training on Tuesdays and Thursdays instead, from 4:30pm until 8:30pm. A minor change, I know, but just enough to throw us all out of sync.

My two regular climbing partners were available to meet me at the gym tonight, which was fortunate, but both of them were tied up until after 5:30. That left me with about an hour on my hands. I ran through my options:

  • I could drive back to my house, pick up all of those books that need to go to the used book store, and trade them in; or
  • I could find some quiet corner in the gym and spend that hour catching up on email, and maybe even make that reservation for “The Pods” delivery; or
  • I could head over to the Cuban restaurant around the corner, get a cafe con leche and an empanada, and read my book.

Guess which one I chose.

There’s lots that needs to be done, and trust me–we are doing it. And yes, when I got home tonight, I packed up a few more boxes (of books, what else?) and cleared off another bookshelf….

But at that particular moment, rather than rushing off on an errand, or trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of productivity out of the day, the best way I could think of to really be in the moment was to take a moment.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should have titled today’s entry brake.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Day 146: Vary

Posted on May 26, 2014 by joshdaddy

IMG_2450Today was a smorgasbord of downsize activities. With so much to plow through, I thought it might be easier to hop around from one task to the next. A little variety to keep things interesting… and to keep me from getting bogged down in over-thinking the “what stays and what goes” decisions. So here’s a quick summary:

  • Clothes: We got rid of our oldest boy’s outgrown clothes; he had the lightest wardrobe to begin with so we managed to get out of his room with just one additional bag of donation goods.
  • Papers: I “discovered” a treasure-trove of junk paper in a small telephone table that stands at the foot of the stairs: old take-out menus, random receipts and mail order catalogs, graded homework assignments, etc, etc. It all went into recycling.
  • Toys: On one of my trips down to the basement, I noticed a bag of dirt-covered stuffed animals; our dog has a bad habit of grabbing things in his mouth before he bolts out the back door. I put them through a wash and dry, and then loaded them into a donation bag. Then I dragged the bag upstairs to our daughter’s room and filled it to maximum capacity with other stuffed animals.
  • Books: I dragged out a big stack of my wife’s old books–mostly grad school books and work-related titles. We cleared out a bunch, which are now by the front door waiting to be hauled off to the used book store. I managed to cull out another dozen or so books from my own books as well to add to the stack that’s heading out the front door.
  • Packing: After all the culling and sorting of books over the past three months, we are just about at the point where everything else will end up coming with us. And today: I packed up our first four boxes of books that will go into storage. Now we have our first entirely clear bookshelf in the house–the same one that I started on when I began this whole book purge.

I also managed to get to the gym for a couple of hours and cook a decent dinner. There may even have been a little bit of video game play mixed in there as well.

That may not sound like a relaxing Memorial Day, and it certainly wasn’t mono-tasking, but it was absolutely the best way I could think of to spend the day. We plowed through a lot, but at no point was I feeling overwhelmed or dragged down.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments