Category Archives: The Bigger Picture

Celebrating Interruptions

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Barb McMahon| 4 Comments

I have been scattered to the four winds this week. It feels like I got up to start my day Monday and here it is Friday and I haven’t even got my shoes on yet.

Let’s see. There was a migraine, two visits from the furnace repair man. I totally forgot that the first one was scheduled. That wasn’t embarrassing. Unshowered, barely dressed. Hi. I’m unemployed. Come on in.

Bats in the bedroom. No, sadly, that’s not a euphemism. There was a bat who viewed our bedroom as his own personal aerodrome. Twice. Have you ever tried to herd a bat at 4:30 in the morning without waking up your upstairs neighbours and with no actual knowledge of the habits of bats? It gets the blood pumping, I’ll say that about it.

There was company, too. Lots and lots of company, which is always nice.

And an unplanned blog redesign, which isn’t.

I’m sure I’m forgetting things, but it’s time to get on to the lesson. Interruptions. They’re what make life happen.

People, especially small ones, are constant interrupters in the smooth flow of your day. The big ones make a good go of interrupting things, too.

If you’re in sales or hospitality, you’ve likely thought, at least once: This’d be a great business if it weren’t for the customers…

But that’s the thing. Without the interruptions of customers, you’d have no business at all. And without the daily and ongoing interruptions of the people around you, you really wouldn’t have much of a life.

Don’t you have a moment, at the end of a really amazing productive day, when you’ve accomplished everything you set out to do, where you suddenly feel a little sad, a tiny bit lonely and you wonder: where is everybody?

And if you look at it just the right way, isn’t life itself an interruption in the Whatever that we come from and to which we will return?

So this weekend, I say, celebrate your interruptions. Answer your phone, check your emails! Let the dishes pile up while you visit with an old friend, take an unscheduled nap or have a tickle fight with your child.

If the universe itself has learned to accommodate interruptions, who are we not to at least try?

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Posted in The Bigger Picture

Tagged celebrations, organization

The Great To Do List Conspiracy – part 3

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Barb McMahon| 11 Comments

I tell you, when I’m weeding my garden, my thoughts just go on and on…

So we’ve covered the differences between what I call cross-offs and practices. We’ve realized (or I have anyway) that life is chaotic and the best list in the world isn’t going to change that.

And now it’s time to wonder…. If life is chaos, then what’s the opposite? What embodies the order and predictability that we all seem to crave? Well, wouldn’t that be the things without life in them? Inanimate objects, stuff? Hmmmm…

So maybe our materialistic culture is a culture of people wanting to find a little relief from the chaos of life. Maybe our huge attraction to the structure of the To Do list and by extension, the Shopping List, to the organizational gurus, to being able to brag about how much we get done is an attempt to keep the chaos at bay.

It’s perfectly understandable, chaos is unpredictable and scary. Finding ways around it is a huge temptation, one to which most of us succumb most of the time.

But it begs the question: what do you really want? Do you want to be alive?

Or do you want to be stuff?

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Posted in The Bigger Picture

Tagged organization, questions

The Great To Do List Conspiracy – part 2

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Barb McMahon| 2 Comments

In part 1, I talked about realizing the difference between practices and cross-offs and listed examples of each.

I don’t know about you, but looking at those two lists made me really see that it’s the practices, as opposed to the cross-offs, that make life worth living. Which is why I don’t usually even have a To Do list, except when I’m tackling a project. It goes against current wisdom, I know. Everybody tells you that you need a To Do list to make your life worth living. And it’s tempting. Except…

I recently worked with a woman who, I think, viewed her job as one big cross-off. She was constantly frustrated by the stuff that needed to be done over and over and over again. Seduced by the easy joy of crossing things off her To Do list, she couldn’t see that her job was, in fact, one long practice.

And I wonder how much of the anger that floats through modern life is caused by this confusion?

We don’t want to practise, we want to get it right, get it done and move the heck on. That’s the recipe for success and therefore happiness, right? Right. Except, except…

My brother John (a very wise man) attributes this tendency to a desire to keep the chaos at bay. Write it down, cross it off, move on and the chaos can’t get you. Except…

When you think of it, life itself is chaos. From the first stirrings in the primordial soup to Christmas dinner with the in-laws (love you guys!) it’s chaos all the way. Tempestuous, unpredictable, full of surprises. This scares the crap out of most of us, most of the time.

So we make lists. We cross things off the list and pretend that we’ve found a way around the central truth of life.

We are naturally drawn to the cross-offs and to the people who will tell us how to win out over them.

Neither of these are bad, in their place. As I said before, I make use of a To Do list when I’ve got a big project on the go, one with a beginning, a middle and an end. And I’m always happy for a new idea on how to make the darned thing work better. It’s just that putting everything on a To Do list can only give you the illusion of control. And I believe that the path to a happy life involves the understanding that control itself is an illusion. Chaos does exist and if you learn to accept it and delight in it, life is exciting and wonderful and amazing. But you probably won’t get a hell of a lot done.

That’s been my experience, anyway. You?

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Posted in The Bigger Picture

Tagged organization, questions

The Great To Do List Conspiracy

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Barb McMahon| 9 Comments

I was doing some gardening the other day. Have you noticed that most of gardening is actually weeding? So I was doing the weeding and hating it because, no matter how much weeding you do, the weeding is never actually done.

And even when you’re doing actual gardening, planting and dividing and planting some more, there’s always a not-done quality to it. The plants go in small and pathetic with lots and lots of space around them, so they’ll have room to grow. After a solid day’s effort, I often stand back, look at the results and say, “Well. Huh….” Compared to, say, decorating, the finished result is often a bit of a let down.

When you decorate your living room, you never have to wait six years for the sofa to grow to its mature size. Nor do you wake up some morning to find that your two end tables have sprouted ten more. No. You do it and it’s done. Which is why I’ve always been better at decorating than gardening.

But somewhere in that train of thought and all the reasons why I hate gardening, the plants that grow too fast or mysteriously up and die, the weeds that rage out of control, the fact that things never look the same from one day to the next, it finally dawned on me: I’ve been looking at this gardening gig all wrong. I wanted it to be something that you do and it’s done and you can cross it off your list. When, it fact, it is never done.

Instead of being a cross-off, like doing up the living room, gardening is a practice, like yoga, or prayer.

And as I relaxed into that realization, I started to wonder: how many other parts of my life am I treating as cross-offs when they’re actually practices? Because getting them confused leads to so much frustration as the practices need doing over and over and over again and I thought we were done with that and why is it back demanding my attention AGAIN?

It’s not the fault of the activity, it’s just a faulty way of looking at it.

So, what are practices, what are cross-offs?

In my life, things like gardening, family and friendship are all practices. Learning is a life-long practice. The rituals of food, sex.

The cross-offs are meetings and projects. But I also, and I think a lot of people do this, break my sacred practices down into disconnected pieces and impose an order on them arbitrarily so I can fool myself that they aren’t ongoing and inherently chaotic, just waiting till my back is turned to sprout weeds and fresh ideas.

Does this make sense to you? Can you think of practices that you’ve been treating as cross-offs? Would realizing that they are practices help you?

I’ve been away from this blog for a long time. Sorry about that. It started with a case of blogger’s block. Then there was a trip, a giant volcanic ash cloud. A new job that is now over. And the endless, endless weeding. I’m back now, though, and very happy to be here. Thanks to all of you who asked! I hope we can pick the conversation up where we left off back in the spring.

Stay tuned – I have much more to say about to do lists….

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Posted in The Bigger Picture

Three Lessons from my Garden

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Barb McMahon| 7 Comments

I’m not an expert gardener by any means, but with each passing year, I get more and more joy out of getting my hands dirty and seeing what comes of it.

There’s a healthy humility that comes from gardening, an acceptance of our place in the bigger picture.

Gardening has and will continue to teach me important lessons in life. These are the top three:

1) It’s good to have a plan.

Being faced with an expanse of earth or an expanse of life and no idea what to do is overwhelming and scary. Just letting things happen gives you a garden full of weeds and a life full of other people’s expectations. Far better to scribble something on the back of a napkin and make your world your own.

2) It’s good to know when to change your plan.

I once planted a beautiful nicotiana in my front garden, so it could offer up its scent to guests returning late at night. By the next morning some very happy insect had eaten the entire thing. A very wise gardener told me that if something doesn’t work in the spot you’ve picked, to either try it in a new spot or put something different in that spot or both. That kind of flexibility comes in handy in life, too. Though often, “It’s not working” isn’t as clear and the sad, bare skeleton of a nicotiana, if you experience that sort of thing often enough in the garden, you’ll learn to recognize the feeling in your life.

3) Despite all your plans and changes of plan, things will happen that you can neither predict nor control.

In a garden, these are called “flowers”. In life, they’re called ‘miracles’. Inhale deeply and enjoy.