Just 10 minutes

I have no idea how much can be said -- and far less, I imagine that is worth being said -- in 10 minutes, but that's how long I'm giving myself to practice this morning.

One of the gnarliest knots in my life these days is the tangle of my needs, my children's needs, Skip's needs and then all of those other people whose needs also wrap themselves around and into ours -- complicating the interweave further. I have responsibilities to address many of those -- given to me by love. Through love, I am tangled up in other people's lives. But without question, I get unproductively twisted up and intractably entangled by trying to address more of them than are, strictly speaking, mine to worry about. The trick is figuring out which ones ARE mine to address.

So often, it feels like trying to separate my needs from my children's needs, for example, I just get more tightly -- constrictively -- tangled. And what that means and how to walk through it is mysterious to me.

I think the reason is that I really just don't know HOW to do it. I didn't grow up in a household where the adults knew how to do it. Whether that's because nobody does, or because that says something about my parents is also something I don't feel able to judge.

Here's the good thing -- increasingly I remember that I don't have to know how to do the things that overwhelm me upon contemplation. I may not have any real choice but to learn -- such as in this case -- but I do get to learn, at my pace, in my time. For today, all the permission I need to stay on track is knowing that I don't have to get it RIGHT, I just have to keep trying, making mistakes, forgiving the mistakes and trying again.

--14 minutes--