My husband is changing jobs after working at this one since he was 15. It's been his only job for his entire life. It's a family business, and he has loved it, but it's time. Change is moving in, people are moving on. It's the right thing, but that doesn't make it easier. Nothing is easy right now, because nothing is familiar.

That Lost Feeling

I remember that same lost feeling for the first few months of marriage, maybe even the whole first year. I was knocked-out in love with my husband (I still am) and I knew I wanted nothing else but to be with him. But it wasn't easy because it was all so different. No parents. No familiar routine. No Mom to run errands with. No old friends to call up for shopping or coffee. Everything was new and different, and because of that, it was difficult to accept.

Everything changed with one morning's strange epiphany during that first year. Joe was doing something - I don't even remember what - but it was different than what I was used to. I was just watching him, feeling that tightening, the offense at what was unfamiliar, when it came: the fact that it was different didn't make it wrong. It just made it different, and I could get used to different.

I Can Get Used to Different

That moment was the first in many steps upward, back to the comfortable glow of familiarity. When I reached that threshold of being comfortable in my new life, it wasn't because I had finally managed to make it the same as my old life. It was because I had accepted a new set of circumstances and behaviors and routines and surroundings as my own. I had put aside the prejudice against the unknown, allowed it to come close enough to me to become known, and had accepted it as something equally good to what I had before. In many ways, something much, much better.

The One That Stuck

I could have shortened that process had I learned a little something about acceptance before getting married. I think it was shorter than it might have been because I had been watching, a long time, and making those resolutions that single people love to make before marriage. A lot of them disappeared once I experienced marriage, but one stuck. Over and over I had seen my friends and family expend all their energy on changing their spouses. It seemed so obvious to me, the single and objective onlooker. You can't change somebody else, and you just frustrate each other when you try.

Create a New Right

I didn't understand the powerful motivation of wanting to accomplish that change until I entered marriage. It's not as simple and petty as I thought, not necessarily a power struggle, though it often turns into that. Mostly we start trying to change each other because we are trying to create a life that feels right. We have strong ideas about what right is. It takes a good bucketful of humility dumped on your head before you realize that sometimes "right" is merely a matter of preference, and fighting to the death over preference is just stupid. Create a new right, together, and you'll both be happier.

I think that's what acceptance is. It's letting go of comfort long enough to get close to the unfamiliar. It's letting go of assumptions long enough to see that the unfamiliar isn't so bad. It's letting go of control long enough to let someone else's preferences be just as important as yours. It's a difficult thing to do.

But we need to learn how to do it.

Some days I wake up and I don't feel comfortable with myself. Some days the whole world feels foreign. Some days the ability to accept is the only thing I've got going.

I get introspective and analytical when I get pregnant. I think it's the knowledge of the huge change to come, the huge change of a new life, new baby. It's a good change. It's miraculous that it happens by all these thousands of tiny changes inside my own body. Baby3 is the size of a lentil bean this week...

So the introspective part is the stuff that we all hit when things get wierd or overwhelming or just when we take time to think. Am I spending my time on the right stuff? Have I lost my priorities? Why do I feel hungry all the time? (Oh, wait, sorry, that's not introspective, that's just early pregnancy talking...).

You know? I start looking at my goals, the way I spend my time, the things I'm accomplishing, or not accomplishing. For the last five months or so I've been working on my freelance writing. I wish I had more to show for it, but it's a slow burn at first. I can feel several different things building momentum, though. It takes time to establish credibility in the freelance world, but once you do, doors open more quickly to jobs that offer more than $3/article. (Just an aside that $3/article is a barbaric amount of money to offer a living human being. Now $5/article...)

Okay. So I've been spending lots of time on writing and things related to writing. The household, and all that pertains to said household, has merely survived during this time. I've done no major projects. I've cooked just enough to keep us alive, and we've still eaten fast food more than I will ever admit. I've done the minimum cleaning and ignored the mildewy corners in the bathroom and the spiderwebs on the ceiling. And we've been okay, but I'm starting to get a little bit tired of "the minimum."

Yesterday morning I spend a couple of hours scrubbing the bathroom. Scrubbing. Hands and knees on the floor, scrubbing. I ran a tub of soapy water and washed the garbage cans, a potty chair, and a booster seat. I took down the shower curtain liner to wash it. I scraped around the faucet and shined the sink. Then I moved on to the kitchen.

And it felt good. I felt refreshed and energized. I'd gotten further behind in what I intended to do in writing that day, and today I worked in the yard instead of catching up. But all the pregnancy-prompted internalizing has led me to a simple conclusion: my life just needs a little more balance. I'd gotten pretty heavy on the "reading, writing, computer" side of the equation and pretty light on the "cleaning, physical, working outside, cooking, creative" side of the equation. As you can tell, I counteract the imbalance by swinging far to the other side for a bit. Now I will start work on making it even out on a regular basis, which probably means some days where I do nothing but sudsy scrubby cleany things and some days where I read and write and stare at the computer and eat fast food for dinner.

I love life. Change is not to be feared. It brings us to better versions of ourselves.

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What does it mean to counter the culture? Our friends at Wikipedia tell us that "it is a sociological word used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day,[1] the cultural equivalent of political opposition."

What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive? (Irv Kupcinet)

Our well-trained American minds immediately think of hippies smoking weed in the back of the VW, war protesters burning American flags... unproductive actions like that.

But what is culture? "All the values shared by a society" is the key phrase here. Our culture consists of those societal structures, traditions, and values which we accept as normal (thus, right) simply because they are. Everyone around us accepts them; they are familiar and comfortable. We do not question their rightness. Read the rest of this entry »

Challenge Update: I'm on a roll, feeling like this 5 am wake time is more habit than not habit. I think I am going to have to continue to think of it as a monthly challenge for another month, however, to really get the habit solidified. Those few days of sickness and "rest" threw off my rhythm. Getting up is rather habitual, but my body is trained well enough to stay awake yet. I can stay awake, and do, but it's a struggle. I need to get that pattern in place so my body clock adjusts. I also need to work on going to bed a wee bit earlier than, oh, midnight.

Improve Your Life: Bill Ford, in his book High Energy Habits, suggests making a list of all the little things that annoy you and then dedicating time to taking care of those things. Here's what he says:

We pick up a lot of drag in our lives; little things that slow us down, which we hardly notice and come to think of as just part of life - inevitable friction, like barnacles on a ship's hull. The good news is that we don't have to put up with them and life is different when we do something about them.

Ford suggests making this list and then choosing three of the easy items on the list and tackling them immediately. He suggests making time every day to deal with these annoyances. And yes, for the inevitable protest of no time, he has an answer:

We are so busy that these little things do not seem to justify a high priority. But it takes energy to ignore them. And that is the cost - the energy spent on ignoring is wasted and it adds up.

So take his advice. I'm working on it. Yesterday I got rid of a dead plant that had been sitting in my living room, annoying me, for months. Then I tried to fix the loose screw on our table. I say tried because once I got the screwdriver and got under the table, the only screws I could locate were tight. So this is an annoyance I will have to pass on to my husband, the resident fixer-improver-constructor-man.

Be Open-Minded: Take a moment and think of a person you spend a lot of time with, like your spouse, your children, your cubicle mate, your best friend. Identify one thing you do, habitually, almost unconsciously, that has the potential to annoy that person. (Just pick one!) Work on eliminating that habit, or replacing it with something that will uplift and energize rather than annoy. You'll find yourself more uplifted and energized as well.

By the way, you can buy Ford's book online at Amazon for as little as $1.99. It's a good framework for revamping some life habits that drain you and includes chapters and suggestions on using your strengths more often, clearing clutter, creating time to think, and more.

I love typing 2008 instead of 2007. For some reason, or perhaps for many reasons, I am eager to be done with 2007 and push on into this new year. It could turn out to be the worst year of my life, but at this point the unknown possibilities are still more appealing than the all too well-known and survived past year.    It has been a year of change. The whole structure of the family business shifted with a fair share of growing pains. While my husband was dealing with those adjustments, I spent a month in Mississippi saying goodbye to my mom. In the six months since mom's funeral, we've begun remodeling our basement, my sister's divorce became final, Mara started walking, we had our second baby, Joe's grandfather moved in with Joe's parents after being diagnosed with liver failure, our church's senior pastor resigned, we started designing and maintaining websites as a side venture, I started putting more time into freelance writing, my dad got engaged to a wonderful lady, we hosted out-of-town family and friends, and we just returned from an amazing trip to Colorado over Christmas vacation.

I resist change even when it is good, as most of us do, so a year of change means a year of emotional stretching way past the point of comfort. Stretching hurts sometimes but it creates growth and brings in new experiences and new life. I need to start reaching for change instead of resisting it. Growth is, after all, what I'm after.

The last couple of weeks have given me a good bit of time to do some reading. Newborns aren't particularly fast eaters; sitting down every 3 hours for 45 minutes or so to feed Robbie has gotten me through a fat stack of library books in the last two weeks. (It has also gotten me through multiple readings of "The Promise Rainbow and Noah's Ark" and "Dr. Seuss's ABC Book," two of Mara's favorites. I bet you didn't know that Z is for Zizzer-Zazzer-Zezzer, did you?) One of the books I've kept contemplating is Charlotte M. Mason's Home Education: Training and Education Children Under Nine . I have skimmed through this book but this time a couple of topics really stood out: first, her discussion of the power of habits, and second, her overview of the training of children.

The Power of Habits: "Habit Is Ten Natures"
Mason's basic premise is that education is the formation of habits. First, we must understand that "the effort of decision is the most exhausting effort of life" and even moreso for the child than for the adult, because they lack a fully developed strength of will. "It is the business of education," Mason says, "to find some way of supplementing that weakness of will which is the bane of most of us as well as of the children."

Our human natures provide us with natural tendencies, desires, affections, emotions universal to mankind as well as the particular quirks of personality unique to each individual. Mason points out that leaving the child to develop "unhindered according to the elements of character and disposition" results in very little progress in the child, if any at all, because "...it is unchangeably true that the child who is not being constantly raised to a higher and a higher platform will sink to a lower and a lower."

Human Nature vs. Habit
But habit, to be the lever to lift the child, must work contrary to nature, or at any rate, independently of her. ...exactly anything may be accomplished by training, that is, the cultivation of persistent habits.

What Mason calls the extraordinary power of habit is the tool of the parent and the educator in leading a child to full physical, moral, and intellectual development, for "it is easier for the child to follow lines of habit carefully laid down than to run off these lines at his peril." Children, like adults, are creatures of habits and as such will walk in the way of their habits whether they have been consciously or unconsciously formed. What parents tend to view as distinct preferences in their very young children are, most often, merely the expression of the power of habit. The preferences can be diverted by replacing an old habit with a new one. Certainly, there is a struggle against letting go of the old habit at the beginning; but once a new habit has become sufficiently ingrained in the child's life, it will be as preferred as the old one ever was.

Overcoming Human Nature Through Habit
It follows that this business of laying down lines towards the unexplored country of the child's future is a very serious and responsible one for the parent. It rests with him to consider well the tracks over which the child should travel with profit and pleasure; and, along these tracks, to lay down lines so invitingly smooth and easy that the little traveller is going upon them at full speed without stopping to consider whether or no he chooses to go that way.

A child who is in the habit of eating only carrots and chicken nuggets will develop into an adult unable to enjoy most of the flavors and textures of food; conversely, a child who is taught the habit of eating what is given without complaint will grow into an adult who consistently tries, and finds that he enjoys, many kinds of food.

The forming of the habit is the most difficult part; once the habit is in place, it will develop in strength with only a little oversight from the parent. During the forming process the continual help of the parent is needed, to remind the little person of what is expected and to let no diversion from the new habit go unchecked. So, to lteach the child to try all new food, the parent must be willing to spend as much time as necessary for those first meals. Perhaps only a bite or two of something unfamiliar is given with the rest of the meal. The parent will point out, at the beginning of the meal, in a conversational way, that there is something new and the child is expected to eat it. Will the child resist? Guaranteed, if the new habit of eating all food usurps an old habit of eating only what is familiar and accepted. At this point the parent must remember that the resistance is not of pain, deprivation, or even preference on the part of the child. Rather, the child is merely rebelling at the idea of jumping from an old, familiar track into a new one. Jumping tracks requires effort and does not appeal to a creature of habit. But the parent knows the child's life will be richer and better from forming this new habit, so the parent must the all-wise ruler in the situation and persist despite resistance.

The child sits in the chair until he takes the two bites. At the new meal, two bites of something else are introduced. There is no need to repeat the instructions; the child will remember. Again, the parent must persist despite resistance no matter how long it takes. Consistence is the only way a habit can be formed, and if the child sees just once that the new behavior is truly only optional, it will take ten times as long and a hundred times as much effort to instill the new habit.

With every meal, a few bites of some new, unfamiliar food are introduced and the unalterable expectation is maintained. The child will initially resist, but less and less as the habit of eating what is new becomes more familiar than the habit of refusing. As acceptance replaces resistance, larger amounts of new food can be introduced, always with the same quiet, unflinching expectation. Soon enough a new habit is formed and once formed requires only that the parent be alert enough to see that it is maintained in new places and situations just as steadily as it is at home.