Читать книгу Make My Life Simple - Rachel Balducci - Страница 7

first things first

When I first considered a book on order, inspired by a life of order, I was a mom with six kids at home. I had recently started working outside the home after spending eighteen years making work fit within my at-home schedule. Like mothers everywhere, I’ve always seen motherhood as my primary vocation, but personally had decided that my professional life needed to fit within my home life. I had found a way to balance a career as a writer and speaker with being a wife and mother, a schedule that worked for me as someone married to a busy attorney who owned his own practice. Add to this the fact that by our sixth anniversary, Paul and I had four sons. Early on, me staying home made the most sense.

But the years went on, and we added another son and (hooray!) a daughter at the end. Five boys and one sweet little girl. Life was busy and crazy and fun. During those years, I wrote from home and traveled for speaking engagements, and this compartmentalization worked well. I could go away for a few days for work and leave highly specific lists in extra-large black Sharpie font, and it was business as usual for my husband and kids until I returned.

When our daughter, Isabel, started kindergarten, I worried that I would feel bored. After so many years of being home and fitting work in between juggling small children, the thought of an entire day with no kids at home seemed vast and empty. It was probably time to find something to do to fill those hours. “What kind of a stay-at-home mom doesn’t have kids at home with her?” I asked, rhetorically.

This was the question I posed to myself, and I should have sat still long enough to consider the answer. Indeed, what kind of stay-at-home mom doesn’t have kids at home during the day? The answer is, plenty. Moms of bigger kids know what I had not yet learned: just because your children are at school for a few hours does not mean you will feel sad, lonely, and bored. Bored?! Perish the thought. Not to worry, boredom doesn’t seem to be on the horizon anytime soon.

But I did not wait for an answer to my question, and I didn’t stop to think through all the ways my already full schedule wouldn’t clear out only because my youngest was now in kindergarten.

So I signed up to teach full-time at the school my children attend.

And it was wonderful. I absolutely loved it. I loved connecting with the students; I loved learning as much as I taught; I loved being out and away from my home, and generally all the joy and excitement of a new adventure. I loved the change of scenery, and I loved meeting a need. Our small, private school needed an English teacher, and I was able to help. It was new and exciting, and I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Around this time, I started to think about how being organized brings peace — the problem was, I didn’t understand yet what peace means. When you have a nice system for the many moving parts of your life, I decided, you can do anything. If you have a smart, efficient method for keeping the house clean, making a menu and paying your bills, then you are allowed to move about the calendar as freely as you please.

But this is not realistic, and I’m so glad a book didn’t get written by me in that stage. You can indeed do anything when you have a few free hours on your daily calendar, but the fruit of doing all the things all the time is not good. I learned this the hard way.

Fast forward a few years. I had been teaching at the school for three years, and in the meantime we sent our oldest son off to college and watched our second son graduate from high school. The next year we would have our third high school graduation in four years, with a one-year break before yet another son’s graduation. When you have your first four children in five years, those children finish high school at a shocking rate.

Life was moving at a dizzying speed, and my brain and heart were beginning to wrestle with this new season. We were no longer a family all under one roof. I was no longer dropping off all my sweet little babies at the same school, all of us riding in the same giant van. We were dispersed, slowly moving from a life that was like a solid block of cheese to a life that had been set on the counter too long and was spreading out, melting.

In my brain, that’s how things felt. All the things I needed to keep track of were no longer in one solid chunk. Gone were the days of multiple boys on the same sports teams, of all my children coming and going from the same K-12 school. Now, we were all over the place. My people were no longer simply in my home or at school, but moving away, going to college, and coming and going at all hours of the day and night.

The “little things mean a lot” approach to organization worked when my kids were little. Make your lunches the night before, put people in bed before they are overtired, have a calendar that lays out the week. However, as my children grew and our world expanded, I knew that those little things were great, but inner peace had to come from a much deeper well. Suddenly, the day didn’t end at 8:30 p.m., or even by 10:00! Bigger kids stay up late to study for exams; they come and go at different hours. My brain was going, going, going because I thought my fabulous organizational skills meant I could do every single thing I wanted to do. Suddenly, those methods that I thought were the key to doing it all (planning ahead and sticking to the plan) were no longer effective. They helped, but they didn’t stop the tiny hamster that was running inside my head.

And so I began to question my approach to order and peace. I realized that God is indeed an ocean of peace, and that he wants that peace for each one of us. But how we will find that peace will shift and expand within the different seasons of our life. Now that my world is a little more complicated, the peace I need will come from sources other than a clean front room and the joy of a well-oiled laundry system. (Also, nap time no longer exists. Just saying.)

What do I mean when I talk about peace? Peace is considered to be the presence of harmony and the absence of conflict. So when we talk about peace within ourselves, we mean the presence of harmony in our thoughts and attitudes, in our home and in our relationships. Peace means a lack of conflict in our soul, in our relationships with God and with those around us.

Despite my best efforts to get on top of my angst and anxiety, I was overwhelmed to the core. No amount of list-making and prior planning quelled the weird feelings in my gut. I felt nervous all the time. I was always going over what I needed to do next, where we needed to go next, how we were going to get all the things done for everyone: for my kids, for my students, for the many sub-groupings on my daily calendar (Carline! Staff meeting! Doctors’ appointments! Writing deadlines!)

What had started as a wonderful, peaceful commitment to work at my children’s school had become my driving focus. No one had done that to me except myself — me and my desire to say yes and be involved and help out with everything. And so, about six weeks into that school year, I looked up and realized that I was on complete overload.

So many things in my personal life had changed in such a short amount of time. Because of that, what had worked for us as a family a few years before was now causing strife for me, which meant strife for my family. Because I had committed to so much, my outside-the-home obligations took my best energy, and I gave to my kids what was left. My children, my sweet babies, were one more entry on my never-ending Today’s To-Do List. Sure, I was organized, but I was also a complete mess.

I was talking this over one day with a trusted friend, who added, “Yes! And your husband!” And it was then I realized I hadn’t even added Paul to the list of “stuff I’m giving my time and energy to.” Meeting up for lunch no longer happened, and date nights had become obsolete. Once upon a time, we put our children to bed at 7 p.m. and enjoyed the rest of the evening together. Now our teenagers stayed up later than us, or I went to bed after putting our younger children to bed and let Paul stay up with our big guys.

Things had gotten horribly out of balance. Good organization is not a substitute for true order. My life was out of order, and it was costing me.

I remember standing in my dad’s classroom. (Yes! We taught together in classrooms across the hall from each other, and it was the best! You can see why I loved being at the school.) “I feel like I am able to perfectly manage this,” I told my dad, holding up my hands about the size of an eight-pound bass, “but I can barely function when the day looks like this,” and I moved my hands out to what you would make that fish if you were bragging. If anything extra was added to my day (and it always did get added), smoke streamed out of my ears.

“You don’t have a margin,” my dad gently pointed out. In the midst of our conversation, he could tell that I was operating much too close to the limits of what I could peacefully handle. That meant that regular life was at the outer edge of peace, with no room for taking a breath.

He was right.

And so, I sent an email to my boss saying I had to cut back. I thought I could limp along until the end of the school year. But it was only November, which wasn’t a good sign.

Truthfully, I had to make changes immediately. I was beginning to look at my life as one giant never-ending to-do list. There was no joy. There was no peace. Heck, I never even noticed the weather anymore. Was it cold? Was it hot? I didn’t know. I ran from my van to drive somewhere to get out, go in and do something, and get back in the van. I was sad and conflicted because I loved working at the school. But I knew, deep down, that my life was disordered.

I had become such a bundle of anxiety and exhaustion that I needed a complete reset. My family needed me. They needed me physically present, to help with all the things a mother does. But they needed me emotionally present, spiritually present, which meant not being someone who stared down every day, wishing it was already over.

God didn’t want me to live that way, running around like a chicken with my head cut off. He doesn’t want that for any of us. He wants us to have joy and freedom. And yes, he needs our “Yes!” to do the things he’s asked of us, but we need to carefully and mindfully consider what those actually are. We all have commitments, things we have to say yes to. We have loved ones, obligations, and responsibilities. We aren’t free to cut all the cords and walk away.

But we can have order, and we can have peace.

At some point in the midst of those weeks of slowly, ever so slowly admitting to myself that my life, my being, was in a state of disorder, I called my mama. In tears, I admitted to her that I felt sad and exhausted, and I was also starting to have panic attacks driving down the highway (I’m nothing if not dramatic).

“You know you can quit, Rach,” she said. And instantly, I remember it so clearly, it was like she had rotated the valve of my emotional pressure cooker. All the pent-up fear and anxiety I had been holding on to was released, because for the first time I realized there might be a solution, that I didn’t need to keep living this way. That life could be wonderful and joyful again, if I could find the ability to take control of — and simplify — the pace.

I was so grateful that she said those words, even if I had no intention of following her advice. “Of course I can’t quit,” I thought. “Everyone needs me and all the gifts I have to offer! I bring so much to the table, how can they get along without me?” It’s possible a little pride was mixed into the equation.

One night, as I was crying out to God in the midst of my stress, I heard him tell me something. It was one of those moments when you know it’s God because you wouldn’t, you couldn’t, come up with these words in this moment of your life.

“Saying yes to me,” I heard him say, “doesn’t mean saying yes to everything!”

And that, my friend, was the light-bulb moment of the century.

Teaching at the school was a good thing. But I had allowed my sense of mission and purpose — my sense of talents and abilities — to be shifted from my primary responsibility to my husband and children toward my job outside the home. Things were out of balance because what was required of me to continue this kind of life-outside-the-home pace was more than I had to give.

A few weeks later, I walked away from the job altogether.

Saying no is a difficult decision. Saying yes makes people so much happier. Not that people make you feel bad for saying you can’t do something. It’s a lot more fun when you can give them an answer that is going to make their life easier: “Yes! I will cover that need. Yes! I can help you out with this.”

But I was on burnout, and I had to change.

It was embarrassing and difficult for me to walk away from my job. Honestly, I felt like a failure. The only reason I could call my boss and say I needed to stop working was an emergency my husband had at his law practice. He was in a season of needing me to be present to him as he worked through big issues, and that gave me the courage to step away from teaching. Thank you, Lord, for kind and loving people who gave me the freedom to utter those words, “I can’t keep doing this.”

And so, I came back home. I began to put my main energy and focus back into my family. And within a few months, I started to craft order, which brought me peace.

order brings peace

Now, this is not a book about how leaving your job and staying at home will solve all your problems. The world is filled with working moms, and I am grateful for that. We need women in the workforce, bringing their light and wisdom and spirit to the world. And when that’s what a woman is supposed to be doing, there is grace for it. Whether a woman works because she has to or because she wants to, when it is what is best for the family (for the money, for a woman’s use of her skills and interests, for her sanity), it is a feasible option. I love that we all have the freedom to make that decision. We each need to prayerfully consider, within ourselves and with our spouse, what our family needs. And then we proceed. We are either outside the home from 9 to 5 or we aren’t. Maybe we are away in the evenings, or maybe being away in the evenings is the least peaceful solution. Maybe we work nights a few days a week to be home the rest. Whatever it is, once you find the rhythm that works, you will feel it.

For me, I had achieved the biggest factor of order: I had simplified the disorder of my priorities. While quitting a job you love isn’t always the answer, in this situation I knew it was. My commitments had drained my energy, and I had nothing left to give my family. My husband and children deserved a version of me that wasn’t completely used up on all my other endeavors.

The first step in order is identifying your priorities and directing your energy accordingly. We proceed from there.

But first, let’s talk about what it means to have order. We need to understand what true order is by first addressing what it isn’t.

Order isn’t a matter of having the most organizational bins or the most detailed calendar. It’s not about labeled shelves and clearly marked containers. Those are all nice to have, but order is much bigger than that.

Maintaining order in our lives means keeping our priorities straight. It’s having an understanding of what God has asked me to do, and then doing it. Order means giving the proper amount of attention to what truly matters. This takes a lot of work.

Think of it like this: You are trying to get out the door to take your children to the park. You have an hour to get there and back, which is great if you are ready to go right this minute. But when it’s time to leave, you can’t find the toddler’s shoe. And then, after twelve minutes spent scouring the house, you realize you also don’t have your car keys. By the time you have rounded up all the things you need to get out the door and have an adventure, half your time is gone.

We can all relate to that concept of order; this is order at its most practical (and where the idea of clearly labeled bins and containers makes sense). But expand this concept to a larger scale. Our “keys” and “shoes” are things that take away our time. Maybe it’s spending too much time on the internet; maybe it’s investing too many hours outside of your primary vocation. It might be spending too much time feeling tired or angry or sad.

If we haven’t taken care of the basics, day-to-day living is crazy. When we’re busy with all the small things, what we need to be doing (the good stuff) gets less of our attention.

So when we talk about order, we mean having all the events in our life taking up the proper amount of our time and energy. Searching for our keys isn’t what life is all about, but for too many of us, the scramble of the nitty gritty leaves us feeling worn out before we even start the things we actually want and need to be doing.

Order in life means understanding, appreciating, and recognizing the season of life I’m in, and then proceeding accordingly.

For example, a mother with small children should not put pressure on herself to have a prayer life that looks like a nun living in a cloister. God has given her the vocation of motherhood, and she is in a unique season of having small children. Those two things (motherhood, small children) take priority over what she might consider an “ideal” prayer life. The ideal is actually doing what God has asked of her right now (being a mom to small children!) and letting everything else in her life work around that.

That is true order and simplicity: recognizing my vocation, and where I am in regards to that, and allowing every other detail to fall into place around it.

From this comes peace.

Peace isn’t only about feeling good about the stuff I’m doing, or following my passions (though your passions are important). Peace comes from acknowledging that Jesus has a specific purpose for my life and that he will give me the grace, wisdom, and time to get it all done. Peace comes from always asking God to be in the center of what I’m doing, and asking God if what I’m doing is what he wants me to do.

The thing about order is that it happens on a very large scale. Maybe it’s even on a variety of scales. First off, we must have the big picture in order — am I doing what I need to be doing? Is my time and energy being used in ways that serve me and my family? Are we making the money we need? Are the practical and emotional needs of each family member being met? The beautiful part of family life is that each individual family must find the answers to those questions, to be honest within the family unit, and then do what works best. We consider all the factors and find the work/life balance that we need.

From there, we work for order in our home, order in a practical sense.

And we work for order within our person, order in our body, mind, and spirit.

And finally, we need order in our relationship with God, which impacts the way we see ourselves and the way we interact with the world around us.

That is a lot of order to maintain! If we think too much about it, we can get overwhelmed.

The best way to maintain a sense of order is not to think too much about the bigger picture on a minute-by-minute basis, but to focus on simplifying the small aspects of our lives that come together to bring us peace. Even our order needs to be in the right order! When we find the right balance, slowly we move in the direction of a peaceful existence. Instead of moving through our days, putting out fires or simply surviving, we are able to thrive.

“Most people don’t do their maintenance and end up controlled by emergencies,” says Christian author and speaker Joyce Meyer. Isn’t that the truth! When we are running so ragged that we don’t have time to get ahead of anything, our day is dictated by the next urgent deadline. Meyer relayed a story of only going to the dentist when she had a major toothache. By avoiding regular cleanings (because she was afraid of going), she was always dealing with urgent situations. Because she didn’t take care of matters proactively, she was controlled by the worst-case scenario.

Here is the benefit of true order and peace: when we are paying attention to the little things, with the right amount of energy and focus, we can eliminate that rat-race feeling. Yes, emergencies will arise. But those will be the exception rather than the rule.

Order and simplicity aren’t the equivalent of perfection. In fact, a great deal of peace comes from letting go of a desire to be perfect. We don’t show the world we are Christians by our perfection — but we have a peace that cannot be bought or faked.

Order brings peace. Order doesn’t bring a life free of mistakes or a guarantee that we won’t ever suffer or feel tired or overwhelmed. But order can help us cut out the fat, help us operate within boundaries and margins that protect us from losing our way.

Lives can have order in so many ways. We can have order in our home, in our thinking, in the way we relate to other people. We need order in our prayer life, and order in our approach to our attitudes about time, money, and talent. There are so many details that make up a day, and when we spend enough time tweaking them (not too much, not too little) we begin to find the simplicity we need to fill our days with peace. Simplicity and peace come from a life of order, which means each task gets the energy and attention it needs.

comparison is the thief of peace

Order and peace and organization and limits — all these things will look different for different people. That was part of my challenge in my journey toward redirecting and reviving my focus. I looked at the women around me, who seemed to be doing the exact same thing as me and then some. I was especially aware of the women who worked at the school fulltime alongside me, who also had children still at home and seemed to manage it all beautifully. They spent more hours at the school than I did and didn’t seem the least bit frazzled.

Unfortunately, I allowed that comparison to make me blind to my own struggle. If they can do it, I reasoned, I should be able to!

In his book on restoring sanity to overloaded lives, Dr. Richard Swenson is quick to point out that physical and mental stress looks different for different people.

“Individuals differ significantly regarding how much stress is desirable or what types of events are distressing,” he writes in Margin. “What strains some does not bother others.… A stressor that for one might be pleasure, for another might be pain. For one, the price of life; for another, the kiss of death.”

People have different levels of stress that they can tolerate, as well as different events that cause stress in different ways. So one event that I might find totally relaxing, you might find completely stressful. And vice versa.

“We must understand,” Dr. Swenson writes, “that everyone has a different tolerance for overload and a different threshold level when breakdown begins to occur. It is important for us to set people free to seek their own level.”

In other words, don’t compare!

True peace and order, a simplified life, has at its core a true understanding of what God is asking of you. This is why it’s so important to always be working toward closer union with God — we have to have a real relationship with him to understand what it is he wants of us. It’s not enough to look at the people around you, people with similar gifts or at a similar place in life. In fact, this could lead to envy and absolute burnout! While it’s nice to be inspired by those around us, we do have to keep our eyes on our own paper.

Here is where a holistic approach to simplicity and peace comes in. We pay attention to our spiritual, mental, and physical needs, and we make lots of small efforts to care for the many areas of our life. We make decisions based on prayer and common sense, and not by looking to see what other people are up to. So much peace and freedom come when we learn to be who we are, who God made each of us to be, and to live the life he called each one of us to live. Personally, I’m the wife and mom of the Family Balducci, and there is no other family out there exactly like us! Paul and I will make decisions for our family life with criteria that won’t look like anyone else’s.

It’s so much easier to do the right thing for yourself and for your family when you aren’t trying to keep up with those around you.

set healthy limits

Know yourself, be honest with yourself. We have to be willing to recognize our stressors, our limits, and not worry when that looks different from those around us. We must allow others to be at peace with their own limitations as well. Problems arise when we find those limits and ignore them.

“Some,” Dr. Swenson writes, “will respond, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ Does this mean you can fly? Can you go six months without eating? Neither can you live a healthy life chronically overloaded. God did not intend this verse to represent a negation of life-balance.”

If we want peace, we have to be willing to admit we have limits.

“Not all threshold limits are appreciated as we near them,” says Dr. Swenson, “and it is only in exceeding them that we suddenly feel the breakdown.” You don’t know you’re on overload until you’ve overloaded.

What I’ve learned in this journey is that we can have order on many levels, but we need to be taking all these aspects into consideration together. Our body, mind, and spirit each know when things are out of order. If you are drinking too much caffeine, your body will tell you. If your focus is always negative, your mind will suffer. And when you run yourself ragged, even if there are enough hours in the day, your spirit will eventually send up a flare and beg you to reconsider.

It’s okay to admit you are on overload. God didn’t create us to do all the things all the time. In fact, built right into our first glimpse of God in Genesis, he creates a day for us to rest. He wants us to take time to reboot, to catch our breath, and to look at the beauty around us instead of going, going, going.

Time off, observing the Sabbath, slowing down at the end of the day — these take effort. We must fight for quiet, especially in a world that makes twenty-four hours of productivity a possibility (have you ever checked your email in the middle of the night? It’s possible to never step away from the To-Do’s!).

We have to work for margins of sanity. We need to fight to maintain that healthy space that exists between doing what we need to do and the state of absolute burnout.

“He restores my soul,” says Psalm 23:3. Part of the way God restores us is by enabling us with common sense that uses our body, mind, and spirit to guide us away from doing too much. The body can handle a lot of stress, but when it gets past the point of healthy stress, it will tell you. Remember those panic attacks I had while driving down the highway? That was my body trying to tell me to step back.

If you are living with that concrete-block-on-my-chest feeling all the time, your body might be trying to tell you to adjust something.

When we start finding that life feels exhausting or that we are always sad or angry or sick, it’s time to consider all the things we have going on and figure out what needs to change.

That’s called limits, my friend, and they are there to keep us sane.

God cares

In the midst of all the effort to have order, peace, and a simple life filled with joy — God is there!

These efforts to streamline are efforts to hear God. When we cut away all the fat, the excess, the busy work, and the things that drag us down, it is easier to tune in to the voice of God.

The beautiful reality is that God cares about all of this, because this approach to simplicity will draw us closer to him. There is no detail too small for his gaze. God wants us to be happy, and he wants us to have the freedom to use the gifts he’s given us to build the Church. Whatever that means for you in your life, God wants to help you figure that out. And when we have the right kind of order, we find the peace we need. We can hear God guiding us with his wisdom and love. This helps us move throughout our days in the life he’s called each one of us to live, in a way that glorifies him.

“He is not the God of disorder but of peace,” says 1 Corinthians 14:33. God cares for us and wants our lives filled with peace.

Ultimately, an ordered relationship with our Creator is at the heart of pure freedom and joy. We must know how much God loves us, and learn to experience that love. When our relationship with God is working as it should, we find the most important kind of peace — that which is deep within, abiding and transforming.

At the heart of all of our struggle for order, God is waiting. When we talk about menus, laundry, and carpool schedules, God is tied into it. It’s crazy, because too often we convince ourselves that God doesn’t care about the minutiae of our day. God can’t drive my carpool for me, so why should I include him in any of it?

But I have learned from experience that while God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit aren’t necessarily who I consult before I plan my weekly meals, they are strangely involved in every aspect of my day. Before I do something as simple as rearrange my front room furniture, I ask for guidance from the Holy Spirit. I know that sounds weird, but when I do, he always shows up. I end up with some idea, some plan, that I never saw coming — something that is the answer to my hopes for creating a comfy space for my family to gather.

God cares.

So, yes, a prayer life and interior peace and not being overloaded with life in general — these are all important in the quest for a simplified, ordered life.

But first, let’s talk about having a clean kitchen sink. Because that helps a lot too.