As I’ve said many times on this blog, I am a classic Obliger, which means that, while I have a hard time getting myself to meet my own expectations I readily meet others’ expectations. How I wish, wish, wish that I had known this about myself 50 years ago! But Gretchen Rubin, the woman who came up with the Four Tendencies framework, wasn’t doing much writing then, as she would have been a toddler. Actually, I wish that I’d known about the Tendencies 53 years ago. I’ll be 65 at the end of this month, so 53 years ago I’d have been 12 years old. That’s a nice threshold age, I think.
self-knowledge
The Joys of Delegating
Well, the March concert of the Cherry Creek Chorale is over. Didn’t make it? You can still get in on our last concert of the season in May. I’ll be posting about that music over on the “Behind the Music” blog and giving links to buy tickets. I have to say, this concert ended up being truly great. It wasn’t until Thursday night’s rehearsal, when the drummer and bass player showed up, that I really fell in love with the second half of the program, all classic tunes from old movies. The first half was great, too.
A Winning Book
We had been driven out of our house this past Saturday for showings, so one stop was at the library. Honestly, I don’t patronize the library much any more, the physical one at least. I get audiobooks and e-books, and I listen to podcasts and read political articles online. So my former at-least-once-a-week library habit has dwindled away to almost nothing. But we needed a place to hang out, so there we went. One of my favorite places at this branch is the nonfiction new book shelves at the top of the stairs. I couldn’t tell you how many great discoveries I’ve made there. Saturday was no exception; I picked this book off the shelf and sat down in one of the chairs upstairs, thinking that I’d read a chapter or two, and I was hooked. I ended up reading all but two chapters, which for me nowadays is kind of a record, and I made sure to read the conclusion.
Procrastination Regrets
This post is going to be in the “I should have known better” category. As I wrote last week, we have put our house on the market, and we started showing it this past weekend. The realtor had scheduled the first appointment for noon on Saturday. Oh man! As I said to Gideon, “You wouldn’t think that getting a house ready to show would be so much work when I really try to keep it in good shape all of the time.” Jim was still finishing up the basement ceiling which had had to be repaired because of this mysterious leak that turned out to be caused by water overflowing from a plant pot in our entryway.
How Happy Have We Been in this House?
Well, yesterday the “for sale” sign went up on our front lawn. We are selling our lovely, lovely house (note that I don’t use the word “home”). I can still remember the day that we pulled up in the driveway and opened the front door. My heart just about stopped as I saw the soaring living room. (The heart issue might also have come from the fact that we’d set off the burglar alarm.) Then I remember the months-long stretch when the bank couldn’t seem to make up its mind to go ahead and sell us the house.
Celebrate the Quirks of Those You Love.
This is becoming an almost-weekly tradition when I take an idea from the Gretchen Rubin/Liz Craft podcast, expand on it, and apply it to my own life. So this was episode #100 (hey, a good time for you to start listening if you haven’t yet done so!), and for this special episode they centered the whole podcast around listener questions. One listener asked about their relationship as sisters, how they manage to get along so well and whether or not they’ve ever had a big blowup.
Further Self-Knowledge.
I wrote earlier this week about how self-knowledge can add to our happiness because we can quit trying to make ourselves do things that we don’t enjoy and aren’t any good at. I mentioned the Enneagram test as one that I’d taken but which gave me some rather confusing results. So I just re-took it, answering some of the questions differently and I think more accurately. Some of them are difficult for me, as either neither or both of the choices seem right. (Read that sentence three times.) One in particular gave me pause, as it was given the choice between a tendency to be sociable and friendly and being solitary and self-sufficient.
Knowing Yourself Can Add to Happiness.
This is another one of those posts that grew out of something I heard on the radio and then managed to find again. It was just a five-minute segment on some woman who lives in New York City and produces modern operas, running her office out of the second bedroom of her two-bedroom apartment. Her production company totals eight people, including her. New York Apartments are pretty small, so I can’t imagine how they all fit in and still get anything done, but apparently they do. She says that it would make no sense for her to spend $30,000-$40,000 per year on office space and therefore not have that amount of money to spend on what really matters to her: producing modern operas by new composers. She is completely focused on the business at hand.
Don’t Let Real Life Get Derailed.
On Wednesdays I look forward to listening to Happier with Gretchen Rubin, the podcast that she does with her sister Liz Craft. I know I’ve mentioned this program many times and will continue to do so as long as they keep putting it out, because so many of the ideas ring true to me.
So this week Gretchen gave herself a demerit for getting so involved in a particular task (in her case, doing the edits for her new book) that she neglected her other work and fell way behind. (Her description of this issue starts at minute 37:00.) This type of thing has certainly happened to me. I get involved in some big project and just don’t want to do anything else. The housework suffers. I don’t get out on my walk. I fail to get the grocery shopping done and we end up eating out or getting takeout. (Yes, I do sometimes say to my husband and son, “I’m leaving dinner up to you guys.” That’s fine. On the whole, though, things run more smoothly around here if I’m at least nominally in charge of meal planning.)
Do You Need a Nudge?
I’m pretty sure that I’ve already posted the following quotation, but I’m going to do it again anyway. I’ve read Anne Ortlund’s Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman multiple times and talked about before. She was a writer and pastor’s wife who died several years ago. I think I ran across DOTBW in the bookstore of my old church. I remember reading it while on early-morning duty at the school where I taught and a high-school boy making a snide remark about the title.