How to work with the wonkiness

In Shut Up And Write yesterday, I copped to the fact that I am having a hard time organizing my Italian stallion of a mind.

(Actually, my mind is Swedish-Irish-raised Lutheran, but I don’t think those people had stallions.)

But let me back up. Not only am I a Recovering Perfectionist (6 years, 157 days sober!), I am also a recovering confusion addict.

Confusion is my drug of choice, when there’s a lot going on and I want to numb out, because it’s all feeling like a bit too much.

One of my friends and colleagues actually once gave me the nickname Stella Scramblepants, when I was driving a 16 passenger van filled with clients home after riding horses in Montana one afternoon, and couldn’t tell left from right.

As in, literally. She was directing me back to the place where she was staying, and said “turn left!”

And I said, “help me. I can’t remember which way is left.”

Stella Scramblepants.

Um, yeah.

So this weekend, I was doing yoga the wrong way (read: I kept stopping the video to write things down on my to do list). And even though I was Doing It Wrong, it still worked. Little insights into how things were going were bubbling up to the surface, ready to be seen and received.

One of the insights was: I am avoiding my email inbox.

Another insight was: My office has become overrun with little pieces of paper, post it notes, and lists in 4 different places (both paper and electronic). Like a crazy person.

That actually wasn’t new.

I already knew that one.

But what was new was this: No one was coming to save me.

For the past few weeks, I have been secretly shopping for a Complete Organizing Planning Tool that could organize my thoughts, moneymaking schemes, lists and ideas. I’ve googled it. I’ve searched Pinterest. I’ve searched templates in Microsoft word.

You should also know that I’ve read Getting Things Done, Time Management from the Inside Out, the One Minute Manager, and watched tutorials on keeping a bullet journal, using Getting Things Done with Evernote, and had multiple conversations with people who are satisfied with their organizational systems, like I had been with mine for awhile.

Until it stopped working.

Until the wheels fell off the bus.

Until my soul rebelled against the whole concept of planning things out ahead of time.

You should also know that I’m planning a business, a move, a wedding and two 40th birthday parties right now. Oh, and two launches.

All wonderful things.

But you heard me right when I said it.

REBELLION.

Because at the root of it all is this: I don’t WANT to be organized.

I don’t WANT to have my months, my weeks, or my days all planned out ahead of time, and then have them go smoothly.

Ugh. Barf. Kill me now.

And also?

In my inquiry and search for a Complete Organizing Planning Tool (in my imagination, it is one page, with boxes where I can put everything that I am thinking, scheming on, cooking up and planning, with nothing crossed out, because it’s just so complete and intentional), what I came to was that new idea – that no one is coming to save me… and that it’s high time to stop the madness.

When I say madness, I mean: looking elsewhere for the solution.

Thinking there is a Solution.

(Ugh. When I write solution, I think of Hitler. Then I think of one of my yoga teachers, who once said, “the sun shines on us all.” THEN I think about how I am still unsettled and challenged by the idea that the sun shined on Hitler, even though I wish it wouldn’t have. And THEN I think about the question the Philosopher loves to ask his students and strangers at pubs: if Hitler was still alive and living in exile on Mars, and you possessed a weapon that could reach that far and only take him out, would you?”

Do you see the kind of Swedish-Irish-Raised-Lutheran-Italian-Stallion mind I am dealing with here?!)

They tell me it’s Mercury Retrograde right now, which apparently means the planets and heavens are also messing with us, serving up an even bigger cosmic plate of spaghetti.

Can I get an oy vey?

So, what I’ve come to is this:

1. No one is coming to save us.
2. Thank goodness! I chafe at those misogynistic fairy tales where the girl has to wait for someone else to save her. This is 2016. We need a new narrative.
3. Breathe and ask yourself: Okay, honey lips, what’s bugging you and what can you do right now to start chipping away at it?

Unfortunately, I cannot sell you a coaching program where I show you how to do this (and charge you either $27 or $1,997 for it, inexplicably).

Or shall I say: I refuse to sell you a coaching program where I show you how to do this.

Because it’s free.

You can do it right now. No opt in required!

As for me, what I did was take all my little “notes to self”… all my post it notes that had been on the closet door and rimming my computer screen… all my orphan pieces of paper that had drifted in from the kitchen and the bedroom, where I make notes when I am trying to cook or fall asleep… all my lists from my yellow legal pad…

And I started to make One Big List in a new notebook (ah, the untainted promise and possibility of a new notebook!).

As I wrote each item down on a line, I threw away the separate piece of paper.

I told myself it was a homecoming, of sorts. A repatriation of my soul. A consolidation of my life force.

To mark the ritual, I lit a candle.

And I stood at my kitchen table, brining all my ideas home to one place.

I smiled.

Grateful to be a person with so many ideas, schemes and richness in her life.

I smiled.

Knowing full well that at some point, the wheels will fall off the bus of this organizational system, too, when life changes and I grow again, and it becomes too small to contain my multiudes.

I smiled.

Finally seeing life clearly, if only for a brief moment.

I don’t need to be other than I am.

It’s normal for the wheels to fall off the bus as I go.

And what if whatever is bugging me isn’t fixed or permanent either… it’s just knocking at the door, asking to be integrated and brought home?