I've tried so many different things to help me get and stay organized. Fly Lady, Motivated Moms, MOTH ... The truth is, I have to dig it up from somewhere inside me. If I'd been taught how to keep my home and family in the manner which I have now come to value, then I'd have the tools. However, that does not mean I'd have the drive, ambition, motivation, willingness - whatever you want to call it. It's a certain thing inside you that gets the job done.

I find myself lacking this. My husband has it. He gets up faithfully, early each day and heads to work until the waning of the day. He is in construction, and he's his own boss. Talk about self-motivation. This guy is totally a self-starter. I struggle here.

What do you do when you don't have the will-power to fight your way through the dense jungle forest of your mind with that machete of focus?

I'm sitting here singing to myself, "Life is a highway. I'm gonna ride it, all night long ..." But maybe life is more like a river. I can't help coming back to this analogy time and again. Perhaps it's the vision God knows will inspire me. We once went tubing down a small river in Tennessee. It took all day, and it was a mixture of rushing rapids and slow, almost motionless, meandering. The exciting rapids were very memorable. In fact, you found yourself just waiting all the time for the next one. "Is it coming up? Do you hear it?" How often our own lives are like that. We live for the holidays or special occassions or even ... tragedies. Some of us live drama to drama. I've heard it said that it's those times of trial that define us. However, that may be a mistake. Certainly the rushing moments are the times that our true nature often comes out un-restrained, but the fires that created that nature seem to me to exist in those meandering times. Either we're waiting for the next big thing or we're living in those times - enjoying the scenery and the sunshine.

It is during these slow spans that our habits of character are fashioned or forgotten. How do you spend your time when life is barely moving along? Some prefer to escape with false or vicarious excitement like television, romance novels, other people's lives, internet, etc. We can all think of these excapes. That's not to say those things in and of themselves hold much vice. Rather, it's the temptation to divert attention from the real life that entails encumberment. So many times we don't recognize a real life because of our entrapment in the fantasy.

So, what do we do during the lull? Create drama? Fight? When I'm in the middle of the chaos of life, I tend to function so much better. I've always done better under pressure or time constraints or busyness. But those darn slow parts ... When I get really behind ... ugh.
Fight or flow? That is my question tonight.

Fight my way through? Set a plan of attack. Make a list. Take each hill successively until the job is complete? This is my instinct, but I find myself unable to make that list. I cannot put my life into a mathmatical equation and get anything coherent from it just now. What about flowing? Perhaps it would do me more good (and my family more good as well) to put off the fight. Take each moment and contemplate the scenery, so to speak. Maybe my van does need cleaning out, not forgetting that, but studying it. Why is it a mess? Well we just returned from two funerals, one in MI and one in FL. We've had four ball games this week. Okay, time to adjust. I won't fight it. I will pick up one shoe, one cookie, one wrapper when I see it. Okay, my bedroom is a mess. Why? Well, I don't really honor my bedroom right now. That could indicate some want of honor for myself and my marriage. I'll have to pray about that. But some of it is overrun laundry from those same trips. It's gonna take a little time to recover from those funerals. I give myself the pleasure and privilege of time, right now. I already folded some of the laundry from the trips while attending to a sick baby. I made a step. It's a slow one, but that is the part of the river I'm on.

Don't forget, Jen, you'll miss most of the trip if all your doing is rushing to get to the next rapids. You'll wear your legs out kicking and your arms out paddling, when you could have rested and reached your destination all the same.