Will You Allow the Urgent to Strangle the Important?

Hurry and Rescue the Important

These days, there are too many things to do and not enough time to do them all. There is an endless supply of distractions to keep us from doing what we know we should. The world is bent of shifting our focus away from anything that leads to true happiness so that we keep trying to buy happiness instead. We no longer have any margin in our lives and often the urgent strangles, and ultimately kills, the important. We act as though we will live forever and that there is always tomorrow.

Unfortunately, none of us live forever and for many, tomorrow never comes. I am sure Harry Chapin never thought that fateful trip across the Long Island Expressway would be the final moments of his life. I wonder how he left things with his wife and children. He did leave behind two beautiful and telling tales, Cat's in the Cradle and Story of a Life.

Want to try a profound little exercise from my all-time favorite professor, Dudley Riggle? Get yourself a blank sheet of paper and write the following at the top:

“If I were told that I had a life-threatening condition — a terminal illness — I would hope for and do the following:”

Let the serious you, the flip you, the noble you, and the not-so-noble you speak. Write down anything and everything for 15 to 20 minutes. Do not censor yourself at all. Next, there are four things you need to do with your list.

1. Continue working on it.
2. If there is someone in your life with whom you would like to increase intimacy, share it with them. We are close to the extent that we disclose.
3. Look carefully at your list and see if it says anything about your values and priorities.
4. “What are you waiting for?! Someone to give you a medical diagnosis that says you have six months to a year to live? Nobody has forever. Your time IS limited. Don’t wait.”

No matter how we feel, we are always in control. Each day, we have a choice. Hopefully, the day will come when we get to reflect on a lifetime of decisions, good and bad. Let us hope that we can look back fondly and without regret. For we only get one shot at each day and each day makes up the story of our life.

Hopefully the following motivational and inspirational piece will help you in your question for balance.

Notes on Motherhood By Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author

“All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow, but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, and one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton, Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education — all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages, dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations — what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old that did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the "Remember-When-Mom-Did" Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language — mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?" (She insisted I include that here.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top.

And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.”

Image Credit: Brett L.