Here are some rare photos of me and Skitter naked of our neckwear. When I lounge on the reclining loveseat in my mis-matching pajamas, somehow Skitter manages to gradually squish me and hog my seat. You can see I hate it when that happens.
Anyhoo… In the previous post I wrote about wanting to be un-me, cuz being me creates problems for me at times. One thing I do that makes problems for me is this: I come to the rescue. It’s what I do. (I’m sure that’s why Suzanne has to make me so many capes.) I think I must say YES to every plea that comes my way. Suzanne and I call me ERRAND GIRL because I have been known to spend much of my time doing for other people what they don’t have the time, patience, or availability to do themselves. I am a do-gooder. I do not say it in a braggadocious way. I mean it in the sense that I seem to have an intuitive skill to pitch in and help. It was a kind of fate I was born into, too. I can’t take credit for that part of it. You do know who raised me, right? My do-gooding skill comes naturally, like some people have a natural musical ability. Perhaps I can’t say NO because I am covered in blessings, and some people have so few. (Let’s face it. Many of you share this yes/no struggle. I know you, you know.)
I think my recent postlessness is very much about getting burned out by too much doing for others. You’ve been there too, no doubt. I’ve been overly generous with my mental and physical energies for others recently, to the extent that I began to feel like I was living other people’s lives while ignoring my own. I was spending my days in the Kingdom Of Saying Yes To Other People. My own behavior caused me to lose my sense of me. I “helped” others let me lose my balance, in order for them to maintain their own.
Balance. That’s my “issue.”
I keep having to learn the same lesson about balance, over and over– and in different scenarios– in my mortal existence. I think it’s kind of like that for all the bigly lessons we each have to learn. We might be working on conquering different things in ourselves, but a lot of the stuff you need to learn is unique to you. Some of the ideas are the same for all of us. We find ourselves running into our own same lessons repeatedly, and that’s a clue we really need to work on that idea.
It’s not necessarily that we’re too stoopid to learn our lessons the first time we encounter them. It’s not that we don’t know we have to grow to be better people– and to keep from being boring to ourselves and others. No, I think we keep hitting our heads against the same lessons at increasingly deeper and more meaningful levels in our souls. We’re stubborn and defensive about our weaknesses, but we hold onto them because they’re what we know. Holding on makes growth slow or even impossible, when growth is always oh-so possible.
Why else do we greedily hold on to what holds us back? There’s a really, really, really, bigly reason we hold onto stumbling blocks, and I’ll explain it in the rest of my theory tomorrow in PART THREE: the final post in this particular philosophical exploration. And then we can get back to silliness. And neckties and bow ties and bolos, oh my!
