"HORSEwork before HOUSEwork" vs
"Clean Something" vs Do Little"
Last time, I featured an interesting excerpt from Martha Beck's article
How to Find the Kind of Joy That Lasts in which she advised folks who were in a slump to
Make Something. Since my work here at HoofPrints consists of making stuff nearly every day - and I'm not nearly as relaxed and blissful as I'd like, I came up with my own little offshoot of Martha's effort -
Clean Something. After that, I advised folks to pick something (mess, clutter, etc) that they could manage in about an hour, and TAKE CARE OF IT. Sounds good, huh? And
I bet you're thinking that by practicing this regimen, that my house, office, barn would be relatively neat and orderly. I wanted to share, just to set the record straight, that that is not exactly the case. It's so not the case that it made me think of the old Saturday Night Live character played by Chris Farley:
Matt Foley - The Motivational Speaker. For those who don't remember,
Matt Foley is the antithesis of a good motivational speaker: abrasive, clumsy and down on his luck, living in a van down by the river! There's a good Conan O'Brien interview with Chris Farley that talks about the character
here.
To illustrate, I'd like to show you a picture of the rather bizarre "creation" I discovered the other day. I dropped something on the floor, got down on my hands and knees to retrieve it, and this caught my eye - it was directly under the center post of my office chair. It was fairly big, and perfectly round, I was immediately horrified as I thought it looked like a giant
spider egg case. It was only less horrifying, once I picked it up and realized it really was just a
giant hairball. A hairball that had survived the vacuum (yes, I DO vacuum) because of the fact that it was tethered TO THE CHAIR by a single long hair, so each time the chair got moved, the hairball stayed exactly underneath it, picking up my hair and
Lucy's hair for who knows how long. Ewww. Of course, I then did what everyone does these days. I took a picture of it and
shared it on Facebook(with apologies to members of the family who do not find any humor in a dirty house - and sorry Mom and Dad - you paid for a college degree so I could write about hairballs on the internet...)
I guess this oddity is no surprise, considering where I live. Alexandria's brief claim to fame 20 years ago was a giant hairball found to be blocking the sewer, causing the previously unsolvable flooding problems.
The hairball made national news - on David Letterman even. My employer at the time
RAM Graphics printed t-shirts in it's honor and it was star of the town's parade.
So, you've been given advice to
Make Something by a nationally known PhD, to
Clean Something by someone who's harboring a giant hairball under her chair, Now, here's one telling you to
Do Little:
"It's a testament to the powerful insight of creativity that one of the biggest keys to deeper communication with all beings - be they four-legged, two-legged, winged or gilled, or even hidden aspects of ourselves - is summed up in the name of one of the most celebrated animal communicators of all time: Dr. Dolittle.
The good doctor was created by writer Hugh Lofting, who had such great fondness for animals that he invented an inquisitive veterinarian who embraced the task of learning their language. Lofting wrote over a dozen books celebrating the exchange of thoughts and ideas between humans and animals, thus inspiring many readers to regard the furred and feathered in a very different way.
Although Dr. Dolittle is fictional, it's intriguing that Lofting chose that name. For central to effective communication with animals is the realization that there is little we need do. In fact, the more we scurry around trying to do this or that - buy a book! take a workshop! buy a universal translator device! - the more we tend to negate our innate abilities. Thus, we further remove ourselves from a genuine and personal deep-down connection with all life.
The Taoist sage Lao Tzu puts it this way: There is no need to run outside for better seeing, nor to peer from a window. Rather abide at the center of your being. Search your heart and see: the way to do is to be. Exactly!
On the other hand, if we don't do things, how does anything get done? It's cool and smart in a Zen-like way to say that all will get done when we learn how to 'be', but how does this work, really? How can we learn to talk with animals without 'doing' anything? What does finding ourselves through be-ing actually entail?"
Read the rest of this fascinating article by Dawn Brunke here
