Whose business?

A picture of good health.  Oy.  Phrenology: fact or fiction?

My latest inspiration to block squirrels from making their mad revolutions on the wheel in my head is a large plastic cone, such as would keep a dog from gnawing at some healing portion of its anatomy.  I'm not sure which direction it should point, for maximum effectiveness.  I have seen squirrels find their way to a bird feeder using, I swear, ropes and pulleys, springs and ladders.  I will have them nowhere near my head and will go to any lengths necessary.

One path to a quieter mind involves leaving mistaken beliefs or behaviors  in the string-tied shoebox on the curb.  For me, this requires letting go of the illusion that I have control over anything not specifically connected to me or my actions.  And even then, it is iffy terrain.  Life, that is Big L Life, has the upper hand always.  Plans?  Hah, it says.  I scoff at your plans.

What has become clear to me over decades of trial and error is that the business of someone else is not mine.  It never has been, it never will be.  I know the squirrels have gotten past the barrier when I start looking at your stuff and not at my own.  This realization snaps me across the wrist a dozen times a day, minimum.  It usually involves those closest to us, those with whom we share space, on whom we depend for support and assistance, those whose stuff it is so easy to observe and judge.

The phrase that revealed this character defect/human frailty to me referred to the situation as, "...allowing the dignity of choice" to the other party.  I am not proud to admit I was once a person who held such thoughts as, "If you loved me, you'd take out the trash NOW."  Even though it was never said out loud, it is not hard to understand one source of potholes on the road to long-term romance. 

I count this awakening, this knowledge, as one of my great gifts.  Boundaries are grey areas for any of us who come from lands where they were unknown, not modeled in a healthy way, continually ignored.  Learning where I stop and you begin is like becoming fluent in spoken and written Mandarin in six months.  One is impossible and the other seemed so.

I cannot abide scolding.  I become small and powerless and diminished in every way.  I am the imperfect, oh, so imperfect, child.  I also cannot bear having to explain myself.  The reasons are the reasons, the product of life as I experienced it.  No one can know what it was or is like in this skin.  I hear the Jets singing "Dear Officer Krupke."  I am not speaking of felonies nor misdemeanors, simply choices that don't mirror ideals of order, the dreaded Puritan Ethic, choices that hint at neglect or indifference or fatigue.

Once I realized how deeply, vehemently I loathe being scolded, I knew I could never again be one of those people without being aware I was the one who was wrong.   I administer an easy test when my eye wanders away from my teetering piles of imperfection to rest on yours.  I simply ask, is this my business?  Are these my socks/books/full wastebaskets/unreturned phone calls?  No.  Mine are here, where I can do something about them or not and thank you so much for not quizzing me about it.

Another use for duct tape

Dr. Sheldon Cooper, from THE BIG BANG THEORY, model for all sorts of extreme behavior and poster child for control issues. As we arrived late for the series, we are catching up with reruns six evenings a week. A few nights ago, I saw the episode with perhaps the definitive Sheldon line as he tried to find new friends who would do things his way. Abandoning them and rushing to be included in whatever his old pals were doing, he explained, of the new bunch, "They were having fun wrong."

At times I wonder if there is anything other than our own attitude that is within our control, for so little else seems to be. Ah, but the years I tried to have it be different. The enormity of our appropriate inability to control much of anything was reinforced this morning as I learned of a dear family member who is facing additional treatment for a disease thought cured. A previous version of myself would have retreated into worry and blame. Today, I chose, for which I am beyond grateful, action and belief in a good outcome. That is all that is within my power.

This morning I also realized - are those solar flares and their radiation bombarding our thought patterns as well as the guidance systems for airliners? - that it was no longer, as though it had been since about 1985, my task to fret about my son's sending or not sending of thank-you notes for gifts received. It was while actively involved in 12-step programs, the ones dealing with co-dependency, that I imagined wearing a thick roll of duct tape as a bracelet, ripping off strips when necessary and slapping them across my mouth. A fine teaching tool to learn the art of butting out. Somewhere, we must be accruing points for what we've managed not to say.

Back to my search for devices to quantify the unquantifiable, the meter that can gauge just how detrimental it is to our own health, those surges of adrenalin and what-not that come from trying to have it our way. My former husband used to tell me I couldn't like some of the things I liked, because they weren't good. I was having fun wrong.

I won't pretend that I no longer fret or that my fingers don't twitch to see some wrongs put right. However, I have learned a bit about about choosing my battles. Acceptance and surrender take up more real estate in my thoughts and vocabulary than they once did. I remember Leon Russell was once referred to, or called himself, the master of space, time and infinity. Whatever that means, exactly. I aspire to be the master or at least the journeyman of growing really still and awaiting internal guidance, duct tape at the ready, surrender to what is beyond my control always at the top of the list.