Ideal World vs Realistic World. It’s on.
IDEAL WORLD:
- Wake up an hour early twice a week to run on the treadmill. Do it again on the weekend.
- Clear 2 hours in your schedule to return all your phone calls.
- Take a yoga class for 90 minutes every Saturday.
- Have it take 15 minutes to clean up each room in your house. Clean one room/day & have 3 days to rest.
- Start & finish a research paper in a month.
- Wake up at 10a on a Saturday to do laundry.
- Do one big grocery shop every Monday night.
REALISTIC WORLD:
- The bed is warm. Outside is cold. The treadmill is in a windowless basement and it might be used by someone else. You didn’t get to sleep until midnight anyway. “I can run tomorrow.”
- In the 2 hours you scheduled to return calls & talk to 5 people, 1 of them picks up. And they have to be somewhere in 10 minutes.
- Realize that between changing for yoga class, walking to yoga class, being early to buy a class/get a good spot, taking the class & walking back, you’re looking at sacrificing 2+ hours of precious weekend time.
- Don’t make good on your commitment to not put paper down, or to hang up your clothes every day, or to put away your shoes. What should take 15 minutes if you were disciplined takes 45. You dread Living Room Clean-Up Day and it falls by the wayside.
- Ignore the time you scheduled for yourself to start the research paper. There’s a class to take! And TV to watch! And you’re sooooo tired anyway, your brain won’t even work.
- Saturday is the one day to sleep in! If you get up before 11a it’s impossible to get off the couch much before 12:30p. But Sat morning time is precious – coffee, bagels, The Soup, hubby time….
- “We have enough groceries. We just need some coffee, some turkey, chicken, soup, bread, salsa, lettuce, tomatoes, apples…….I’ll order it online for delivery so it could be here tomorrow. The convenience is worth the marked-up prices. Oh wait, we’re not home tomorrow! OK, so the day after….I’ll just buy lunch instead of brown-bagging tomorrow…And we’ll order in dinner…..”
I hate to say it, but Ideal World is where my intentions live (I like to think they reside in a 1,000 square foot Manhattan loft that was purchased for under $100K 15 years ago & is now worth about $2 mil). I spend countless hours learning about organizational tools and being productive – even getting wonderful e-sessions by a professional organization coach! – and I go through all the motions. I do all of the steps. I put my tasks in my calendar. I block my time into categories so I know that my social time for right now should only be scheduled on Fri & Sat nights.
But my intentions do not live where Realistic World lives. Realistic World is full of fun friends, and family functions, and forty-two inch TVs, and other “f” words (get your mind out of the gutter). It’s where the clothes go on the floor instead of in the laundry bag, and shoes remain in the living room instead of in the closet, and where it’s emotionally hard to leave your hubby’s side to do your own work in the cavernous bedroom. And you’re tired. A lot.
I need to find the balance. And the commitment. And the responsibility. And the grown-up in me.
Think I can find Good Intentions World instead? Eh – who am I kidding? I wouldn’t want to live there anyways.
Related posts:
December 10th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Good Intentions World? Isn’t that the place with the paved highway leading to H-e-double-hockey-sticks [after all, this is a family blog!]
Don’t kid yourself; you’re making great strides. I hope your readers know that any all-or-nothing attitude (in dieting, exercise, organization, habit-changing or just plain living) is counterproductive.
Willpower is tough…and while it sometimes gets easier, it’s never easy. It’s easier to eat junk, sit on the couch, zone out, ignore reality and wish the world away. But eventually, we end up with the life(style) we (mostly) deserve.
If you can’t get out of bed to work out, give permission to your spouse to drag you out of bed, if necessary, and plop you down on the non-cozy floor…and hand you coffee and workout clothes. Promise him you won’t hold it against him, bite him or throw the coffee back in his face. Or ask a friend to call you at 2p on a Saturday to see if you did what you were supposed to (work out, write, pay bills, pick stuff up off the floor) and then either stay on the phone with you (while she watches a movie, or whatever) or call you back in 15 or 30 to say “NOW did you do it?” No man or woman is an island–it’s OK to call on support from others.
The ideal world never really changes; our real world is only as good or as rough as we make it on any given day. We strive for excellence, not perfection, and we savor small victories. Sometimes, we need to give in to our malingering, and other times we need to ask someone to help slap us out of our malaise. The trick is to always come back up swinging.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Michelle,
What does being “grown up” look like for you? Are you perhaps limiting your options by a restrictive definition of “grown up?” How much of realistic world do you really want to change (emphasis on want)? And you know my next question is going to be: How many of the above are intentions you really want, and how many are “should” intentions?
But I’m with ya. Really hard to find the time to do all that you want, especially the boring but necessary chore stuff.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Thanks for the encouragement, as always. I obviously don’t come home and throw the mail up in the air and kick my shoes in the air and throw my jacket in the air & leave them where they land. And I do feel WAY less overwhelmed/crazed/ridiculous now then when we started. Honestly, I think I’m in the middle somewhere.
And let’s not kid ourselves – an all-or-nothing attitude is H-e-double-hockey-sticks! That’s where frustrations, and perfectionistic (I think I just made up that word) notions, and ultimately failure live. Not to mention it’s no freakin’ fun!
I love how you think that Luke is awake, just waiting for me to get out of bed and work out. That’s so cute! Um, in reality he’s snoring besides me. It doesn’t help that he leaves for work almost an hour after me either. So – it’s up to me to get out of the warm bed and drag him with me!
At this point I know it’s about the journey, in regards to trying new things and getting out of comfort zone – and discovering what works & what sticks for me.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Joanne, you’re always so smart! I know that most of me DOES want the Ideal World – it just seems like a place where rainbows and kittens and ponies and sparkles are. It seems like less work, too! The lazy part of me likes that.
But yes, it’s about getting to WHY I have these goals and WHY I want to get my life/time/tasks more organized & less chaotic. It’s easy to have a surface response but I think I need to dig deeper.
The “grown up” that I want to be is the opposite of the Stepford Wife-like person who lives in Ideal World. I want to reach my goals and have fun getting there, while making sure that I have time for the things that are important to me – spending time with those I love and fulfilling my passions. The “other stuff” – like laundry – is stuff I need to get done as quickly as possible to give me more time for the other, better stuff! I want that mix of responsibility and fun.
Maybe I can find Fun Responsibility Land….
December 10th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Fun Responsibility Land sounds like the perfect place. I think I’ll retire there. Now only to find it on the map…
December 10th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Trust me – it’s in Hawaii.
December 11th, 2008 at 9:08 am
How about the “I get to have it all” world? Friends and clean laundry ftw! That’s one of my favourites
December 11th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Ooh, that would be nice! I Get To Have It All World comes with a robot that does all the cooking, cleaning & laundry – right?
December 11th, 2008 at 10:13 am
[...] « Ideal World vs Realistic World. It’s on. [...]