Day: October 11, 2009

One of the things that has been absorbing my time this Fall is reconnecting with various communities. I’d fallen out of touch with many of them for lack of time. Now I am back in touch and realizing that I am blessed with the problem of community over load. I have a church community, an extended family community, a neighborhood community, two school communities, a local writer’s community, a local artist/cartoonist community, a gaming/role playing community, an online writer’s community, as well as the communities inherent in participating in social media such as Facebook and Livejournal. Fortunately most of these communities have a lot of over lap, so it is actually possible for me to manage it all.

It has been wonderful re-connecting. I had not realized how disconnected my insanely busy schedule had made me. I’d lost touch without even realizing that I’d done it. Slowly I’m starting to catch up. I’m starting to know what is going on in people’s lives. I’m starting to see and care about the issues that each community deals with. It feels good.

Of course there are days where I want to flee into my room and hide because there are so many people. I like all the people, but I can get overwhelmed just by my four kids on a bad day. Of course hiding all the time is not good either. So I get out. I socialize. Then I go back home to assimilate and re-energize. The good news is that being a connected member of a community requires less effort than re-connecting with a community. I think I’m getting to the less effortful part of being a community member. That will be nice.

There have been times when I’ve truly enjoyed the process of storing food through canning. Today was not one of those times. But the pears were there, waiting, threatening to turn rotten and fill the house with fruit flies. I had the jars, lids, and rings. I even had the time. What I lacked was the desire. No part of me wanted to peel or can pears and no amount of logic could change the way I felt about it. Part of being grown up is doing things that are the right thing even if I don’t particularly feel like it. So I canned pears. The three quarts now sit on my kitchen counter and I am trying to feel accomplished instead of resentful. Also, I’m trying to ignore the box of still-not-quite-ripe pears waiting for me. Hopefully I’ll find my canning mojo next week when they’ll be ready.

It is interesting to me that I can spend an hour weeding a grassy flower bed, knowing that the grass will return from the roots I didn’t get pulled, but I’ll feel happy and satisfied with the job I’ve done. But I can look at those three quarts of pears which I will never have to can again and just feel tired. Emotions and logic don’t even have a nodding relationship sometimes.

Sometimes how I feel surprises me. This evening Howard and Kiki headed out for a social event. We’d all planned for me to stay home with the younger kids. It wasn’t until I learned that this was a whole family event that I realized exactly how much I wanted to go, not for the movie that they would be watching, but just to get out of my house and away from my routines. (Or maybe just away from the pears.) I loaded the kids and went, and had a good time.

Emotions ambush me. They lay in wait or sometimes linger far longer than I would like. This does not mean I am powerless against them. I choose my actions. I can choose to seek happiness no matter what my circumstances. I can’t make the happiness show up, but if I continually make a happiness shaped space in my life, somehow I always find happiness there. I feel fine about the pears now. This is because I spent some time choosing things which enriched my day. I sat in the sunshine, I went out with friends. Enough applications of these kinds of things and even the canning of pears fails to provide sufficient negative stimulus to prevent me from being happy.