Help
With Your Rule
Side-Tracked!
Dear Holly,
Boy, am I struggling with disciplining myself to stick with my rule. More often than not I am so side-tracked! And honestly, I feel that it is not honorable distractions but pure slothfulness. If anybody has any advice on how to fight that I would sure welcome it. I have my rule posted on the wall, but I am so inconsistant at staying at it. The poor kids never know if I'm going to expect them to stick to it or not. I feel like such a failure in this area.
Labels: 2nd P Person, About a Rule of Life
posted by Holly at 10:11 AM
4 Comments:
First off, I understand your feeling like a failure, and perhaps a weekend 'off' to give yourself a break may be in order. You may need a refreshment - a mini-vacation - a Mother's Sabbath (for the purpose of refreshing spiritually).
Secondly though, it may help you to remember that if you are beginning a rule, it is not that you are a failure, but that a number of things may be going on, and it will only help you to look at your first few months as 'assessment mode.' What is working? What is not? What can you change? You can talk to a friend or husband to look at your rule and give feedback.
In addition, I would track my activities, hour by hour, for a week, and see if I could find my 'natural' rythms. It is hard enough following thru with a rule, but if these new time-schedules don't suit your temperament, family life, and unique circumstances, then you are setting up for failure.
Take a blank sheet of paper and for 1 week, write down, hour by hour, the activities you are naturally drawn to in what time frames. You may find that you function best getting up at 8 instead of 7, or that you are most naturally drawn to prayer in the afternoon than early morning, or that you consistently tend to clean up at 4 pm instead of 10 am. Watching your natural schedule and the natural lulls of your children over a week, will aid you in taking what you DO have already and molding it into a more fitting schedule.
Secondly, I would look to see if you have allotted enough time for the various types of tasks. Are you giving yourself enough time to do the morning chores, without stress. Stress can discourage us quickly.
Next, are you providing enough 'you-activities' to help motivate you? Scheduling in a little email time, or a coffee break, or a phone call in between larger tasks provides a way to refresh, relax and not feel driven. It could be that you have planned so much serious stuff back to back, that there is little time for you to be a human.
We need to remember that we are in this for the long haul, and what we plan must be realistic and sustainable, even if it doesn't seem as 'generous' or 'radical' as we would like.
Another idea would be to 'chunk' your chores - to place them all before or after meals, or in one large chunk once a day. This has a wonderful benefit of opening up your day in large spontaneous-sections, instead of scheduling every half hour with chores.
So, you could have a morning chore time of 1/2 hour, an afternoon 1/2 hour, and an evening 1/2 hour - and those are the only times, outside of meals, that you do chores. This opens the rest of the day for whatever else you need/want to do.
Lastly, our motivation and vigor (emotional motors) tends to come from our thoughts and hearts. If our thoughts and heart cannot find a reason to latch on to our duties, then we are probably suffering from a lack of conviction, a lack of inspiration or even a lack of accountability.
It may help you to refer to some of the spiritual reading books I have recommended on other posts on this website, to keep your mind and heart engaged and excited about serving God. You see, so may times, we mothers spend a great deal of time alone - we need the added motivation of good books and spiritual motives to keep us going. You could also look at starting a parish group of mothers - support is essential to motivation. Another thing is to see if you could place yourself under obedience for a bit to give you the added strength of living your rule - being accountable to someone holds great weight.
Remember too that a rule is a response to God's request. Where God calls, He qualifies. But we need to go to HIm, ask Him and call out to HIm for His strength. Then, our first action toward doing His Will is like the light switch that turns on his Grace. Prayer is essential for you, as it is for the rest of us. If you can't get it in the morning, do it at night.
Try some of these.
I can really relate to where you are right now and that's why I really appreciated Holly's writing on the insidious problem of sloth. I have it too. I find that from morning until about 2pm our schedule is pretty packed and compartmentalized: morning prayers, wake up and get ready, breakfast, clean up, schooling, recess/break for mom, snack time, chores, errands, lunch, clean up, more school. We usually end at about 2pm. It's at this time that my problems begin. From 2 until bedtime there are a lot of things I would like to fit in but it isn't
absolutely necessary when they get done so as a result, I often end up
not getting them done. I think the big problem here is the "getting
sidetracked" issue. There are many things we need to do that don't
come up on a regular basis that use up our precious time (phone calls,
scheduling and organzing, and putting away things!).
So, consequently, since I am currently having problems in that time slot I am going to really focus on it and try different things to see what works and what doesn't. I am a big proponent of breaking things into manageable pieces. I have thought of "doing the list thing", i.e., just listing what needs to get done during that time and then checking them off as I do them. But I do think that what I really need to do is be more disciplined (less slothful) and realize that I it is possible to schedule these things...with some flexibility.
One thing I've learned is that I have on my schedule slots of time
called "pad time" and my pad time can sometimes add up to a couple of
hours a day but it's really not 'extra' time, it's the time used to transition, to change diapers, to write down that idea or item on the groc list, or take a sip of coffee :-), etc. For example, on Tue between 9:45 and 11:45a I have to write my groc list (15 min), get the kids a snack (15 min) and I allot 1 hr for errands, that leaves 30 min "pad time" and believe me it gets used up, but I don't feel frustrated by scheduling something else in that 30 minutes.
Thank you so much, Holly for your response.
I just wanted to share with you what happened last night regarding this.
The other day I literally said to my husband, "How do I discipline myself? How do I stay on task, I struggle everyday." It's not just falling behind, but a complete lack of focus and desire? or something I couldn't put my finger on.
Last night I simply called to God, "please show me". I lay in bed picked up your book and opened it to the middle of the chapter on the 2nd P and began reading. What I found was God's answer!!!
"That problem was a nasty little personal motto that had followed me all my life: 'But I don't want to!' Of all the difficulties I had encountered in my search for personal wholeness, perhaps my greatest enemy waas my interior spirit of rebellion."
And a bit further down...
"I remembered something Fr. Tom Daley....said...'Freedom is taking responsibility for who you are to become.'"
I lay there and wept and wept for I knew that the answer to my question was really within myself. Just because I didn't WANT to do something doesn't mean that I can't or shouldn't. If I want to be a different person than it's UP TO ME and it won't be easy.
Thank you for all you've done!
Like Holly said- tracking the natural patterns in your day really helps! My 4 year old, 2 year old, and 11 mo. old play well independently right after breakfast so we jump into schoolwork for the older two kids at that time. The kids do a good job picking up the house right before lunch because they know we don't eat until its done. I feel somewhat worthless/spent in the early afternoon so I give myself some time for reading/computer. Right after the little ones naptime, the kids seem extra full of energy (probably since they've had to be quiet for two hours) so we like to play the piano/sing/dance at that time. We seem more motivated to clean up again an hour before Dad comes home because we tell each other, "Dad doesn't want to trip over a bunch of toys. Dad doesn't want to put his feet in a bunch of crumbs when he sits down at the kitchen table." And the biggest thing that has helped is setting a bedtime for myself. In the evening when everyone is asleep and the house is soooo wonderfully quiet, I tend to want to stay up forever, only to find myself cranky and dragging in the morning. Don't fight those natural patterns in the day, work with them!
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