Sunday, May 18, 2008You're Soaking In ItI hate writing this blog, I really do. It really demonstrates what a nimrod I am sometimes, and how pathetic it is that it's taken me this long in life to get some fundamental concepts.It was the popcorn bowl last night that did it. And the dishes from tonight's dinner. It may come as a huge surprise to many of you (given the usual state of romance in my life) that I am actually kind of a neat freak, especially when it comes to dishes. I'm kind of a fanatic about washing dishes immediately after a meal. During preparation of a meal, I'm the one throwing away every stray scrap and peel and washing the dish the second something gets taken off of it. I'm pretty annoying, actually. The perfect meal, to me, is one where you can wash every dish it's taken to cook it in WHILE you're cooking it... so that when you're done you only have the eating dishes left to wash. When possible, I'll wash the dishes before dessert, so I can really enjoy dessert. I used to be much worse, actually. But this is really how the inner OCD freak inside me likes to operate. So. That's me. And the only reason I reveal all these ugly facts about myself, besides wishing you to feel secretly superior and tell your friends about my blog because it will make them feel secretly superior as well -- is because you need to know how enormously significant a thing it was for me to leave my popcorn pan, the butter melting pan and the bowl in the sink last night. And not wash them. At all. Until this morning. Huge. Unprecedented. But.. hey... it's been a kind of unasetting month. Pyshcic turmoil. Confusion and communication gaps. Ancient wounds being opened up and bursting forth with poisons and decays from fifty years ago. Days without tears were a norm for several weeks running. And yet I'm learning some stuff. I'm learning to live a life without definition or a plan. I'm learning to survive uncertainty. I survived some hideous trips down memory lane and am thinking I may still remember how to laugh. And I seem to be learning that time helps immeasurably with resolving some issues. It's like time is the great hair conditioner of the soul. You pour it on and things untangle. Knots unkink. Seemingly insurmountable ganglions gradually diminish and become benign. So I figured I'd try something wild last night: put the oily pans and bowl in the sink, squirt them with dish soap and leave them overnight. This morning, I got up, saw the pile of dishes, dumped out the water and deemed them easily ready for the dishwasher, and had them neatly dispatched in less than a minute. Which was a lot easier than doing them last night. Which means that procrastination helped me, rather than increasing my burden. That's the painful part of this blog. Because I realized something: sometimes working to make something happen is simply not as effective as letting it be for a time... and then pretty much letting time take care of it itself. Time can do a lot of work for us in these situations. I am painfully learning to simply let some issues in my life soak in their own juices for awhile. I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to change the things I'm not happy about. I know a lot of things have changed for the worse recently, and I don't know how to fix any of it. And I have to continue to not know for a long while. As my son Chris once said, when I was agitating about some other guy -- "chill out, mom. Let it marinate a bit." Let it marinate a bit. There is no substitute for time. As my friend the physicist says: T (for time) changes everything. So tonight, I'm going to take the psychic dishes and just let them soak in the sink for awhile. I'm tired. And I'm tired of working so hard. I'm tired of being in pain, and I'm tired of being in so much control. Let time and soap bubbles and water relax the crusted gunk that's stopping up my flow. Let time and some benign neglect wash some old stuff out, with a minimum of effort on my part. If time can't fix the problem, then time will make that clear as well. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:28 PM 0 comments  
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