Learning To Pace

I have never wanted to admit that I might actually have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue, even when I could barely drag myself out of bed or when my days were filled with literally crawling from one place to the next.

Admission felt like giving up.

And if I gave up, I might as well give up on life itself.

However, for the last few weeks, I have been in an unending cycle of pain, more, pain, fatigue, more fatigue followed by yet more pain and more fatigue. I finally understood why people contemplated suicide.

So I have had to do something drastic.

I mean DRASTIC.

I have had to pace myself.

Now I'll admit that I'm not very good at it.  I have always believed that if you start a project you see it through from beginning to end, including all the clean-up afterwards. None of this half-hearted crap. All or nothing, baby.

But that is no longer possible. Sometimes, by the time I get everything ready for a project, I'm too tired to start. And when I've done some of it, I'm too exhausted to totally clean it all up and put it away for the next time.

Which, of course, means I rarely start anything because All or Nothing!

However, I have been editing a series of unrelated books lately--unrelated except that all of them seem to have a message directly for me contained within the run-on sentences and dangling participles that I fix almost on auto-pilot.

The message hasn't been subtle: You aren't living the life you created to live.

So naturally I began praying...er whining..."How can I do what I want to do when I don't even have the energy to do what I have to do?"

The answer came back: PACE

So I've been trying to do that. Like today.  I had a burst of energy so I got out the hose and Windex Outdoor and sprayed/cleaned four windows.  I have 30 or more windows in the house, so four is like nothing.  But I did the four, felt the exhaustion swallow me, so I turned off the water, coiled the hose, left the Windex Outdoor right beside the hose and came in the house.

I wasn't very happy about not completing the entire project, but then I looked out my office window--one of the four--and realized that I could see so much more clearly that it really was worth it.

Maybe later today I'll have the energy to do four more windows.  Or maybe not.  But at least there are four that are now clean that weren't yesterday.

Pace.

Not a lesson I'm enjoying but apparently the one I need to learn right now.

Anyone else learning this same lesson?

Punishment vs Accountability

Do you know the difference between punishment and accountability consequences?

I didn't. At least not until recently.

I was taught that if you did something "wrong," you were punished. It's a lesson I think most of us learn as kids. Misbehave and you'll be punished. When we become adults, that ingrained lesson lingers. We think of our boss "punishing" us when we are late or sometimes even our spouse "punishing" us when we fail to do something.  The consequence of our less than ideal behavior is a punishment. In fact, we even "punish" ourselves. How many times have you blown a diet, only to punish yourself by saying you will never eat sugar again?

Consequence equals punishment.

The old lesson dies hard. Very hard.

But thanks to Dov Baron, my mentor and friend, I began to reframe my thoughts.

I've come to realize that a punishment is something imposed on us from the outside. It may--or may not--have anything to do directly with whatever it is we have failed to do. This stems from our earliest training. If you ran into the street, your mother might have yanked you back and given you a swat on the bottom. You were punished for running in the street, but being swatted and running in the street really don't have anything to do with each other per se. It's just that's how your mother decided to impart a certain lesson.

Or think about a child who won't eat dinner and is sent to the corner. Sitting in a corner and refusing to eat peas aren't absolutely linked. Again, it's just how your parents decided to teach a lesson about food and eating.

As we get older, the mantra becomes "Let the punishment fit the crime," so missing a curfew means getting grounded, for example. But still and all, punishments rarely address the subject of accountability. They simply are negative consequences imposed on us by an authority. If punishment were truly effective, there would be no repeat offenders. And our jails give lie to that.

Which brings me to accountability and consequences. Accountability means that I take full responsiblity for my actions--all of my actions, good or bad, right or wrong, foolish or wise. I and I alone am responsible for them.

Now I can hear the objections already:  What about things outside my control? What if, as happened to me today, I said I would send a file to someone and my email server went down. How can I be accountable for that?

Well, I'm not accountable for the failure of the email server. But I am accountable for the fact that the file didn't get where it was supposed to be at the time it was supposed to be there.

And here's where the idea of consequences comes to play. I am still accountable for the file transfer, regardless of the email situation. I am must hold myself accountable with consequences for my failure to do so on time even though it was "impossible" because of circumstances outside my control.

I realize this is a challenging concept...and not a particularly fun one because it eliminates every possible excuse and requires a consequence for every failure.

I can hear you again--this is crazy.  If I can't do something, I can't do something so why should I punish myself for something I couldn't do?

And that's where the difference between punishment and accountability consequences comes in. If I were simply going to punish myself for not having sent the file on time because the server was down, I might make myself drink my coffee black for a week, or work out for an extra hour or any number of unpleasant things designed to be a punishment. But none of those would show accountability--merely masochism.

Instead, and this is what I did do, when the file finally was able to transfer, I told the recipient that because the email server was down and because I wasn't able to deliver on time, I would be at his disposal for the next 24 hours to immediately make any changes that he would like--at no extra charge.

The reason I did this was because I was accountable for my action and inaction. I wasn't "punishing" myself. I was simply telling him--and me--that I have the moral integrity to be responsible at all times for all the things I do.

There's a bit more to it than that, but I've reached the word limit that the gurus tell me is optimal for a blog, so I'll leave the rest for the next post.

The Last Responsibility

The security guard passed me, close enough to touch, as I exited the courtroom. For a moment I was tempted, like Lot's wife, to turn around and watch as the defendant was handcuffed and taken into custody, but I didn't. I spilled through the doors to Courtroom 306 into the hallway with the rest of the observers and witnesses to stand for a few minutes in stunned silence before we went into the rest of our lives.

I walked the two blocks from the courtroom to the parking structure. Across the street, a small farmers' market offered fresh spring produce. The early afternoon sunshine warmed the sidewalk, causing little wisps of steam to rise from the wet spots in the gutter. My heels clicked as I walked. I normally wear flats, but today I wore heels.

As I entered the glass-fronted elevator and pushed the button to the third floor, I thought, "My mother always wore heels."

My mother had died two years and five months before, almost to the day. Today marked the end of a betrayal, the end of seemingly endless time spent in criminal investigations and the justice system but most of all, it marked the end of my responsibilities toward my mother. 

(Read the story behind the story here.)

It began when I quit my full-time job to work as a free-lancer and become her caregiver.  I was her only child and there was no one else to care for her. Her health was poor, she was in her late 80s and was not expected to live too long.

She had some money from the sale of her house in a savings account that she wanted to keep “in case of an emergency.” As paying for her care, including numerous hospitalizations and surgeries, got more and more difficult, I finally made the decision to ask her loved and trusted financial advisor to invest that money in something that would give her a modest return so I could have some help in paying the bills.

He took the money--and that's when the nightmare began. For four more years, I struggled to give her the quality of end of life we all deserve, all the while the quality of my own life was spiraling downward. She declined slowly, inexorably, spending nearly one year on hospice--meaning that every night for months on end I went to bed expecting to receive a call telling me she was gone.

During these months, her financial planner continued to tell me that things would turn out okay in the end, even though the "nest egg" that I had given him had been lost in bad investments. I trusted him, because I was too exhausted and grief-ridden to question.

Then one night in January 2012, after I had been assured by hospice that she still had some time left, the phone rang at 3 am. She was gone and for once I was not there.  I was devastated and racked with guilt.

Her advisor attended her funeral and came to my home afterwards and met with my closest friends and family. A few days later, I got a call from a detective who came to my home and helped me realize that my mother’s money had not been invested, but stolen. The investor had put half into his personal checking account, which was overdrawn at the time, and used it to make payments on his Porsche, pay his children’s private school tuition, and pay on a personal credit card. The other half he used to shore up a failing business he owned to get others to invest in it.

For the next two years, through a series of legal manuervers and wrangling, he managed to avoid trial and remain free. I ran into him once at Costco and slipped behind the tv display to avoid a confrontation. I had begun to think he would never be accountable for his crimes--which included stealing nearly one million dollars from nine clients, including my mother, and much more in security fraud from others. 

 

But the end finally came. When the judge passed the sentence, one of the first things she said was "How could anyone have to gall to attend a funeral when he knew he had stolen her money?" I have no answer to that, other than to recognize that once you start down the path to deceit and crime, the slope rapidly becomes steeper and more slippery. His actions affected, not just me and the others he robbed, but our families--and his family as well. Like ripples in a lake, the evil spread and spread, creating waves of pain and sorrow on far distant shores. 

These past two years have been the hardest ime of my life,  not just because of the financial stress, which has been considerable, but because I could never come to true closure about my mother's death because this, my last responsibility to see that justice was done in her name, was with me every single day.

I was tempted to watch as he was handcuffed, but that would have meant continuing to look backwards. 

Now it's time to move forward.

De Profundis

Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.
Let Your ears be attentive to my voice in supplication.
If You, O Lord, mark iniquities, Lord, who can stand?
But with You is forgiveness, that You may be revered.
I trust in the Lord; my soul trusts in His word.
My soul waits for the Lord more than sentinels wait for the dawn.
More than sentinels wait for the dawn, let Israel wait for the Lord,
For with the Lord is kindness and with Him is plenteous redemption;
And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.--Psalm 130

It's been half a year since I blogged and I truly feel like I am coming "out of the depths." Today, as Lent begins, I felt like it was an opportune time to write again, to think again, to share again.

These past half year I've been looking at myself, especially at the role of forgiveness in our lives. During the next weeks, I want to share some of the insights I've gained and some of the ideas that have and are changing my life.

But for today, the ancient words of the Ash Wednesday service will suffice:  

Remember, woman, that you are dust and to dust you shall return.