Should.
That fucking word. I swear to Christ.
It haunts us with things left undone. With potential. An endless stream of what-ifs, could-haves, and maybes that meld into a theatrical chorus of “You are not good enough as you are”.
I’m not talking about positive self-improvement. I’m talking about those twisted voices whose only purpose is to torment. We all have them.
“The Shoulds”.
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I have an annual tradition where toward the end of the year I deep clean my apartment and purge everything I don’t use. Year after year I slowly work myself toward being a minimalist.
If you come across an item you’re not sure about while you’re in the process of decluttering there is a three-question system you use:
I’ve been doing this for a while, so most things need two or more yeses to stay.
This year what struck me as I started cleaning out my ever-dwindling cabinets is that they are not full of “things” anymore. They are full of the people I used to be, or people I wish I was.
Because I understand multiple points of view, it takes me a while to figure out how I feel about things. I’ve always seen this as a weakness because in debates I am not able to respond quickly. And I can’t just blurt out whatever comes to mind because I also come with this self-edit-function that won’t allow me to stand up for something unless I know it’s true to ME.
And I wanted to sit on this until I knew I was saying my truthiest truth.
I turned on The Sound of Music today to keep my head occupied while I started reorganizing my living space (a fall tradition).
It’s one of my favorite movies. One of the things I really like about it is that every time I watch it, something else pops out at me. Today’s thing was Maria’s reoccurring line:
“When God closes a door, somewhere He opens a window”
I surprised myself by responding, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s always true.”
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The only thing that is still the same in my life right now as it was 18 months ago, is that I am currently breathing and have a heartbeat.
Truth: Even though I’ve been a musician my whole life, I don’t listen to a lot of music. Never have. Mostly because I always have music playing in my head, so sometimes I really can’t because it sounds like two radios playing at once. Yuck.
In school, I was trained in Classical music. The history of it, where it came from, how it evolved, branched out, church vs. secular and all that… but I never studied rock music. Or really any modern music outside of the “played-by-a-symphony” area. Mainly because I never planned on being a rock musician. Funny how that worked out. (Now I know why I felt like I never quite fit in. Haha – retrospect is awesome. )
So, recently I decided that I wanted to educate myself since this is my career and all, so I poked around online and from several different places put together a list of the 100 “greatest albums of all time” that I want to listen to before my birthday – which is September 17th, by the way. Gifts are always welcome. 🙂
You are overwhelmed. You are scared. You are the adult and the decision is yours. Everyday the decisions are yours. All of them. No one is going to tell you what to do.
But you don’t know what to do. You don’t know which decision is the right one. Or the situation is so convoluted there are multiple options but none seems to truly be the right one. Or more than one could be correct, or maybe three. And then even what initially seemed to be the wrong answer starts looking like it might be the best way to go.
“Don’t just stand there,” your brain says. “You are scared. You are uncomfortable. DO SOMETHING. ”
I used to. I used to just do something. Just pick something at random and go with it so that the decision was made and the uncomfortable would stop.
Which had disastrous outcomes. (As you may have guessed)
