In Search of Better Metaphors
December 31, 2019

   Indeed, my cup runneth over – and over, and over, and over.  And I don‛t want to harbor any illusions here: this may not always be a good thing, or a useful one.  It may, in fact, reflect a regrettable waste if not handled properly. 

   But before I get to that thought, I acknowledge the bounty that I have, and I give thanks.  Abundance – indeed, overabundance – marks my life.  And in order to learn what to do with it, I must first see it as such.  I am grateful.

     So what‛s the problem?  It is this:  I have more abundance and responsibility in my life than I can reasonably enjoy and shoulder alone (and yes, I believe those two things – abundance and responsibility – are bound together).  My cup runneth over, and this one little fly has too many elephants on her plate, to shamelessly commingle metaphors.

     So what do I do about it?  I take Justin Rhodes‛s advice to turn an apparent problem into a solution – to see the opportunity in it.  What is the opportunity here?  To find new, more effective metaphors.  

    To view myself or my life as a single cup or as one fly receiving these blessings is to place limits on them.  I must, instead, see myself as one who shares this wealth and seeks partners to bear its burdens with me.  I already have some great partners, of course – Brad, my legal assistant Beth, my parents, colleagues in professional and community service settings, and even my kids now, as they‛re growing.  But what I really need is a different model, a different modus operandi, one by which I act and understand myself as conduit and not as respository, and as co-laborer rather than martyr to the mission.  Abundance that flows through me, as opposed to abundance that flows to me, will not stagnate or cease.  And abundance that flows through me alongside my family, friends, and neighbors – that is abundance, indeed.

     I suspect this is one of the reasons why the river is a central image in so many religious traditions.  So, River.  That‛s a good start.  I‛ll go with it.

Eater of Elephants
December 30, 2019

     I have been known to bite off more than I can chew.  When I was serving as Managing Editor of the Oklahoma Law Review during my third year of law school, I would often lament to my mother about how overwhelmed I felt by the necessary tasks and responsibilities of the job.  This was in the days before kids, of course, so my threshold for feeling overwhelmed was significantly lower – but nonetheless real.

      My mom‛s response to my moaning sometimes came in the form of a quirky, but apt metaphor: ‟Georgeann, it‛s like a fly eating an elephant.  You just take one bite at a time.‟  It was an idea that had gotten her through her own doctoral dissertation more than thirty years before, and it‛s similar to Anne Lamott‛s admonition to writers to take their subjects ‟bird by bird‟.

     So fast forward ten years (exactly) from my year as Managing Editor of a scholarly legal journal – the responsibilities of which ended up taking me about a year and a half to complete, by the way – and here I am, with growing children, a steady law practice, a budding farming practice, and deepening community ties.  To say my plate is full would be an understatement.  Hello, my name is Georgeann Roye, Eater of Elephants. 

A Matter of Form
December 29, 2019

          Virginia Woolf suggests in A Room of One‛s Own that there are (or will be) ‟feminine forms‟ of literature – and that whatever those forms may be, they will likely be shorter, more condensed units than "masculine forms" of literature.  Writing in the late 1920s, Woolf‛s basic notion was that the typical woman's experience – or at least that of her imagined future cohorts of female writers – would be characterized by fewer stretches of uninterrupted time to write than those through which male writers ply their craft. Children and any number of exigencies of a woman‛s life, she posits in the book, call for new forms of literature by which women can bring forth their gifts – forms shaped by women‛s lived experiences.

     Woolf may or may not have been right – although I think she was really on to something.  But in any case, I, for one, am certainly interested in exploring forms that work for me, as a woman who has the audacity to think I have something meaningful to say in the world, but whose current circumstances (as mother, lawyer, homesteader, and community advocate) admit of only tiny nuggets of time in which to try to say anything.

     Here goes.

All the Thyme in the World

It's so easy to feel overwhelmed.  My to-do lists are epic – more a record of what I don't get done than what I do.  And it's so easy to fall into the twin traps of wearing one's busy-ness as a badge of honor, on the one hand, and complaining about it, on the other.
     
I want to avoid both of those traps, of course.  There is real danger in overcommitment – for one's  relationships, one's health, one's finances, and the quality of one's projects.  And we need to take this danger seriously.  By the same token, it is also unseemly, or worse, to complain about having to carry through with the commitments one has made.  Decoupled from action to responsibly handle one's commitments (including ending them when appropriate), complaints ring hollow, smacking of a lack of maturity or courage.  

Much has been written about both of these traps, much of it generally wise.  There's a whole subgenre of self-help literature out there urging people to "simplify," "downshift," or get "back to basics".   It's been around for many decades, long before Marie Kondo invited us to tidy up by getting rid of anything that doesn't "spark joy."  And it's safe to say I have been a simplification enthusiast for many years.  From my high school speech team days, when I composed original speeches exploring the idea that "less is more," to moving from corporate-defense-attorney-in-the-city to small-town-#mommylawyer-and-would-be-#hobbyfarmer in the last few years, I've been aspiring to the simple life, or a version of it, basically all of my adult life.

You can probably guess what comes next.  There's a big "But" just itching to make its way onto the page.  So here's the "But" you might expect:  But now that I'm living into that aspiration, I'm realizing my simple life is anything but simple, at least if the definition of "simple" includes significant amounts of free time to reflect and relax.  Free time?  What's that?  I can't even wrap my head around the idea anymore.  Between the kids, the household, client projects, community projects, and farm projects, all my time (and more) is fully accounted for.  And that's with a lot of help:   a spouse who's fully engaged at home, a cheerful and diligent legal assistant at the office, my loving parents, a generous professional mentor and his legal assistant, the highly capable people I serve with in community organizations, my kids' teachers and caretakers – not to mention the good people at Kenmore and Samsung who made my washer, dryer, and dishwasher, or the good folks at the municipal electricity authority who help make sure those appliances have power to run.  My village, writ both small and large, multiplies my time in ways I could not manage alone.  Twenty-first century loaves and fishes.

So with all this help, why don't I have any "free time"?  Undoubtedly, there are a variety of reasons, which are probably layered upon one another in interesting ways.  But for now, I'll focus on two possibilities.  First, it may just be that this season of life doesn't afford much in the way of unallocated time.  My kids are little – ages six, three, and almost-two at this time of this writing – so caring for them is necessarily time and energy intensive, crowding out a lot of other activities.  I can't count how many times I've had friends with children five or ten years older than mine knowingly and sympathetically say, "It gets easier" – usually when I'm chasing two wild ones (or breaking up a fight) and wondering where the third wandered off to.

But does it?  Should it?  This is the "But" you might not expect and the second possible explanation for why I seem not to have any "free time".  What if there is something not-quite-right about the idea of "free time" to begin with?  What if time is never "free" – at least not in the common, casual sense of that phrase?  What if the simple life is less about time off and time out and more about time spent on valuable projects, projects that help address real needs in the world or enable us to bring our gifts into the world?  What if the freedom of the simple life is not freedom from responsibility but instead freedom to be able to respond to a worthy need or a deep calling?  What if you become gripped by a vision of the good life that, to some extent, takes on a momentum and a gravity of its own, drawing you into a dance with and toward itself, through which you might transform into someone who can respond to the world, or at least your corner of it, with a mature sense of purpose?

And what if this good and simple life is really hard sometimes (or most of the time)?  What if it leaves you sleep deprived for weeks or months at a stretch, or frequently takes your breath away with the sheer volume of tasks required?  What if it means things will be messier than you're comfortable with, both literally and figuratively, or that you have to live with a greater degree of uncertainty and vulnerability than you would prefer?

I want to be careful not to overstate this second point.  I take it as given that paring down and practicing a certain minimalism is a good thing, whether we're talking about physical possessions and debts or activities and engagements.  And I certainly don't want to downplay the need for self-care or the very real risks of burn-out and overextension. But I am learning that neither minimalism nor self-care, in and of themselves, should be my goal.  I shouldn't practice them for their own sake, but rather because they are means to other ends. They are methods or strategies to help us figure out what's important, what matters, what "sparks joy."  By de-cluttering our living spaces, our wardrobes, our calendars, our diets, and our minds, we create time and space for the important stuff.  We prepare ourselves for the miracle of the loaves and fishes.    

     

But at some point, we've got to actually start doing the important stuff and not just clearing room and time for it.  And ironically, that's where things can get complicated again.  First of all, how do you know you're doing the right important stuff?  How do you choose between one worthwhile task or goal or life path versus others?  As a practical matter, there are infinitely more good and important things that you could potentially do than you can actually do.  Einstein might have come to understand that the linearity of time was a "stubbornly persistent illusion" – but I, for one, still have not figured out how to teach my oldest how to tie her shoes and consult with a client on an estate plan at the same time (although I've come awfully close a few times).  Or, to pan the camera out a bit, I cannot simultaneously inhabit the life of a tenured professor of religion at a university or liberal arts college (the path I once assumed I would take after college) and the life of a small-town mother, attorney, and community advocate.  Perhaps there is another quantum reality in which I, or some version of me, is inhabiting that other life – or the life of a public school administrator, or the owner a New England apple orchard, or a publishing house editor or writers' agent, or even a writer myself (gasp!).  There are at least half a dozen life paths that probably would have been a good fit for me. But the "I" that walks my current path cannot, or at least does not, experience those others from the inside.

At some earlier point, like Frost's speaker in "The Road Not Taken," I had to choose between competing goods, between alternative versions of the good life.  Those "two roads diverged" in front of me (or three roads, or four, or more), "and sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler," I had to pick one.  Fortunately, both for me and for the poem's speaker, the one I took seemed (and still seems) "as just as fair, / and having perhaps the better claim".  Yet it was a real choice.  Having taken one path, I'll probably never get to take the others, at least not in any fully incarnated sense.  "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back."  And there is a measure of tragedy in that, which should be acknowledged, perhaps even mourned a little bit.  Being human means we don't get to do all the good things.  The linearity of our day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience of time – illusion or not – means that, as a practical matter, we are limited to taking one path at a time.  We must make choices.

But – and this is the key and final "But" – what if that very limitation is the ticket?  What if the practice of choosing between competing goods, in matters both large and small, on a daily, even hourly, basis, is itself a path to the good life?  What if that is what it means to be free, or – dare I say it – to have "free time"? 

Here's what I mean: There is a certain clarifying effect to handling a little more than you're comfortable with at any given time.  If you find yourself in the privileged predicament of having more good, important, and necessary things that you could do with any given chunk of time than you can actually do with that time, then you have to prioritize.  You have to figure out which of those competing goods is important enough to act on at any given moment, weighing both shorter and longer term considerations together, and then channeling your energies in that direction for as long as that particular good demands – or until another good makes a stronger claim on your time.  And that process or practice of choosing the most important thing at any given time has a way of purging or winnowing less important uses of your time from your life, and making you more efficient in carrying out the rest.  In this sense, taking on a little more than you're comfortable with can itself represent another strategy, an alternative to paring down, for feeling out what really matters to you – by forcing you to confront the issue of the value of your time over and over (and over!) again.

No doubt there are risks to this strategy.  Inevitably, you will not get your priorities right sometimes, perhaps a lot of the time.  And the pressure just to check some items off the ever-burgeoning to-do list can skew your time toward smaller, more clearly accomplishable goals, rather than bigger, bolder ones that require tending over long periods in order to bring them to fruition.  It's easy to find yourself adrift on a sea of tasks, lacking a unifying mission.  Also, mission creep is real.  But the discomfort that arises from trying to walk the fine line between growth and overextension is itself instructive, even if you cross the line more often than you should.  If you can train yourself to pay attention to that discomfort and use it as an ongoing impulse to seek out what is really meaningful, odds are you will, in fact, spend your time on things that resonate with your search.  Seek and ye shall find.

* * *

Of course, it is entirely possible that this reflection is just an elaborate rationalization of my own more or less constant flirtation with overextension.  If that is so, then I must accept the consequences.  But if there is some seed of truth here, then I stand to grow in my ability to discern meaning through the practice of prioritization.  And as I do, maybe I will find some convergence between those various paths that "diverged in a yellow wood."  Maybe they're not quite so mutually exclusive.  I may not be able to inhabit them all from the inside, but maybe – just maybe – I can weave strands of them together as I walk my chosen path.  I am writing (and editing!) this blog, after all, and the apple trees we planted last year are just a few weeks away from spring pruning.  I'm working closely with the administrators of our local public school district, in my current volunteer position as president of the district enrichment foundation.  And who knows?  Maybe teaching an adjunct class at the local junior college lies somewhere in the distance.   

* * *

A couple of weekends ago, Emma and I started our first seedlings for the herb garden we hope to put in this spring.  Last fall, we had gone in with some friends to place a seed order large enough to get a good discount from the seed company.  We ordered mostly vegetable seeds – several varieties of tomatoes, a couple different types of onions and peppers and cucumbers, some corn and green beans, and a few other veggies – but also a few herb and flower seeds.  Then, several weeks ago, I sat down with all of my seed packets to start a planting plan.  I had to figure out from the charts and instructions on the back of each seed packet which ones needed to be started indoors soon (then later transplanted) and which ones could be direct seeded in the garden bed in a few months, after the last frost.

As it turned out, the seeds that needed to be started earliest were the thyme seeds.  So Emma and I prepped the soil plugs and opened the seed packet, at which point I realized this was going to be a little harder than I had anticipated.  Thyme seeds are tiny!  Like, fine-grains-of-sand tiny!  I couldn't even pick them up with my fingers.  The packet said it held approximately 200 seeds, but all of them together didn't even fill a teaspoon halfway.  I could see why most people who put fresh thyme in their kitchen gardens just buy the seedlings.  But our soil plugs were ready, so I carefully poured about half of them onto a white piece of paper – fortunately, thyme seeds are black – and got a small cup of water to dip my index finger into.  I dabbed my wet finger onto the paper, attracting about three or four seeds at a time, then pressed them lightly into each of thirty-six plugs.  I couldn't tell whether I was actually getting the seeds into the plugs, since I couldn't distinguish the seeds from the soil.  So, blindly, just acting on faith, I dipped my finger back in the cup of water between each "planting" to clean off the bits of soil, dabbed up a few more seeds, and pressed them in the rest of the plugs.

Then we waited.  The thyme packet said it would take fourteen to twenty-one days for the seeds to germinate, so I wasn't expecting anything to happen right away.  We moistened the plugs with water from a spray bottle, covered the seed tray with clear plastic, and set it under the fluorescent lights of our grow cart. 

So we were more than a little surprised when tiny green sprouts emerged after just a few days of light and mist.  At first, a half dozen or so appeared, and then over a few more days, another couple of dozen popped through.  I felt like we were watching a minor miracle unfold in slow motion: new life pressing its way upward and outward, reaching toward light while feeding on a dark nutrient bed.  I felt rich.  Having squeezed in the time to plant these seeds, amidst the pressure of all the other good and important things that compete for my time, we were now witnessing a new type of abundance emerge.  I might chronically feel short on time, but at that moment, I felt like I had all the thyme in the world. 

I'll take that kind of freedom, anytime.

January 27, 2019

Why I Don't Believe in "Work-Life Balance"

(Or, A Tribute to Mary Oliver's Grasshopper)

            Because it's a false dichotomy.  And like most such dichotomies, it obscures, submerges, and silences more of the truth about lived experience than it reveals.  That's what makes it false. 

                                                                                                                                     

            But I find the "work-life balance" dichotomy especially pernicious.  These days, its untruthfulness strikes me most squarely when some well-meaning friend or acquaintance asks me how many hours I "work" per week.  It's usually someone who knows I have both small children and a small-town law practice, and often comes in a setting where one or more of my children are clamoring (or clambering) for my attention. I've taken to responding, at least initially, with a warm chuckle and a question: "Do you mean the hours I work for monetary compensation, or the hours I work for some other kind of compensation?"  That usually elicits a chuckle in return, followed by some discussion of the challenges of "juggling" family with professional responsibilities. 

            My question, of course, is designed to shift the conversation out of the well-worn "work-life" rut, at least a little bit.  I hope to unsettle the idea, implicit in the question about "working hours," that the only work that really counts as work is work that a person performs in exchange for money.

            Like most people, I do many things every day that can feel a lot like work, but for which I receive no monetary compensation.  Are Brad and I not working when we run those seemingly endless loads of laundry and dishes, or when we change little people's diapers and brush little people's teeth?  Are we not working when we collaborate on the weekly grocery list, or when we make dinner and sit down to eat with the kids (two of whom still need a fair amount of assistance at meal times)?  Am I not working when, about twice per month, I make sure our household bills and financial accounts are in order?  What about all those hours I spent nursing my kids when they were infants, or pumping breastmilk?  Was that work?  What about when I mow the yard or clean the bathroom or feed the dogs and the chickens?  Am I not working then too?  Brad and I hope to put in a sizeable vegetable garden this spring, which translates into many hours of planning, planting, pruning, picking, and preserving.  Will that count as work?

            Or is that the "life" part?  In the uninterrogated version of "work-life balance," "work" is what a person does for money, and "life" is . . . well, everything else – ranging, I guess, from showering and making the beds all the way to keeping up a running or yoga practice and binge watching This Is Us (or, in my case, binge listening to audio books on my phone while I shower and make the beds).  "Life," in this frame, is supposed to encompass all of the daily and weekly tasks of maintaining a modern life (with the assistance of all our modern techie appliances, or a hired assistant) and everything we think should make our lives – or our kids' lives – pleasant, perhaps even meaningful.

            But is this construct useful?  Does it actually lead to a sense of a pleasing and meaningful life?  Or is it, as I suspect, a recipe for resentment, burn-out – or worse?

                                                                                                           

            The basic problem with a framework that sets "work" and "life" at odds with one another is that it ends up, ironically, devaluing both money-making endeavors and everything else.  On one side, it casts a drear shadow of death, or at least drudgery, over the activities by which we support ourselves financially, the category of things we uncritically call "work."  A literal reading of the dichotomy suggests that when we "work" to secure an income, we are setting life aside or putting life on pause.  If this is the case, then we're spending an inordinate amount of time in a quasi-dead mode – an average of 38.9 hours per week for Americans employed in all non-agricultural sectors, including so-called "part-time" workers, according to 2018 figures published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.⃰

                                   

            How dismal.  And what a betrayal of the value we Americans profess to put on work.  Is this what we have in mind when we tell our kids they should do well in school – so they can die a little death every day at those "good jobs" we tell them they need to get?  Is this what women have struggled for decades to achieve by making their way into the professions and the paid labor force – the privilege of devoting a significant share of their waking hours to something less than life?  Of course not.  But the work-life trope (which I suspect emerged in earlier decades as a way to grapple with the tension or dissonance that professional women felt as they assumed roles tailored by and for men) tends to bury a brighter view of work: as a source of dignity, an outlet for expression of our full humanity, or at least a partial means to that end.  

            This is not to deny that some level of drudgery is built in to every profession or job; "dignity" is not exactly the first word that comes to mind when I'm responding to an endless stream of emails, figuring out how to cure a title problem on a piece of real estate, or reviewing a municipal construction contract.  Nor is this to suggest that the mundane elements of work are the same in quality and quantity across different kinds of paid employment; the hotel housekeeping employee's set of potentially mind-numbing tasks looks very different from mine – and the distinction is probably important, though I will have to leave it for a later reflection.  But at least for me, a professional woman coming of age in the early 21st century, when I pan out and recall that as little as 100 years ago, I wouldn't have even been allowed to seek the credentials necessary to review a municipal construction contract, all of a sudden, the task doesn't seem quite so mundane.  Rather, it reflects a recognition that I have a set of personal and intellectual skills that are valuable and necessary in the world.  Can we excavate this view of work from beneath the bleak work-life landscape?

            And what about the other side of the ledger?  The other key downside of the work-versus-life paradigm is that it puts extraordinary pressure on the "life" side of the equation to compensate for the daily death that it takes to "earn a living" (another phrase rife with irony in this discussion).  If "life" is what we're supposed to get back in exchange for sacrificing ourselves at our paid jobs, then the work-life balance construct herds us toward a narrower, shallower concept of "life" as relief or escape from . . . from what?  Work, of course.  It thus encourages a creeping sense of entitlement to time and activities or experiences that feel distinctly un-work-like.  It thereby sows seeds of resentment about time we may need to spend cleaning out the garage, packing a lunch, or balancing the checkbook.  In other words, when we view work and life in opposition to each other, we end up sort of unconsciously expecting life to supply us with a certain kind of leisure – a mindless, unintentional sort, untethered from a sense of purpose or any kind of responsibility.  And this sets us up for disappointment if we don't feel we're getting enough of that kind of leisure to compensate for all those "working hours." 

            Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with leisure per se.  It is leisure, after all, that gave us the Mona Lisa, Hamlet, and the Ninth Symphony.  It was because they each had a measure of leisure that Newton could work out his laws of motion, Ben Franklin could fiddle with his kite to begin understanding electricity, and Einstein could conclude that e=mc².  It was the lack of leisure, and the lack of a room of her own, that took the life of Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf's imagined sister to William, who, by the accident of being born female, was prevented from expressing her great literary talent.  And it was certainly leisure that gave Mary Oliver, who died earlier this month at the age of 83, her now-famous encounter with that little grasshopper – the one whom the poet observed in minute detail while "idle and blessed" on a "stroll through the fields," the one who helped channel the question that beckons to us all in "The Summer Day":

                        Tell me, what is it you plan to do

                        with your one wild and precious life?

(Read the full poem in a collection available on the Library of Congress website, here: https://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html.)

            Indeed.  "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"  That is the question.

            And that is why I don't believe in work-life balance.  When work is death and life is merely a series of brief escapes from that death – escapes that one deserves because "I earned it" – little if any terrain is left over for cultivating a sense of purpose or calling, a sense of wonder and curiosity, a sense of gratitude and abundance in every part of our lives, whether paid or unpaid.  The work-life lens blinds us to the magic that is present in the seemingly mundane, the dignity in what often feels like drudgery.  But if we train ourselves to tune in and pay attention in all of our endeavors, instead of mentally or emotionally checking out when we're wearing one hat versus another, we stand to gain a sense of a coherent, animating purpose for our whole lives, leading us to make more of the brief years we're given.   

                                                           

            I am holding a little grasshopper now.  Her name is Madeline, and she's still in her pajamas.  She and her sister just woke up, and she wants me to hold her on my "wap" for a while.  Her baby brother is calling from his crib.  In a few minutes, they'll all need breakfast.  The dogs will need to go out, the dishes in the dishwasher will need to be put away, and the sheets will need to be stripped from the beds and washed, along with the towels.  It is the weekend, after all.  And tomorrow, back at the office, I'll tend to my emails and make my way through the to-do list that is like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole at the county fair: one task crossed off, only to give rise three more.

            But right now I'm looking into this little grasshopper's soft brown eyes and wondering what they will see in this life, how much more they will see than what I have seen or will ever see.  I'm wondering whether I'm up to this task – of doing my part to create and sustain a world where she can bring her gifts into being and share them, whatever they are.  I know that sometimes I'll receive money compensation for doing my part; other times I won't.  And much of the time, I won't feel balanced at all.  But balance may be too high a price to pay for this "one wild and precious life."

⃰ See Current Population Survey Table 21: Persons at Work in Nonagricultural Industries by Class of Worker and Usual Full- or Part-time Status, as last modified Jan. 18, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat21.htm, accessed Jan. 22, 2019.