From Order to Disorder--The Way of the World

My one year-old nephew was visiting last week. While his mom took a call, I played with him in our living room, and I noticed something that seems pretty common with boys.

They are destructive!

If I stacked the blocks, he knocked them down.
If I lined up the cars all in a row, he scattered them.
If I put the plush toys in the crate, he fished them out and threw them on the floor.

By the end of the day, my living room looked like a war zone.

The scientific term is entropy— a gradual decline into disorder.

Interestingly, entropy is also known as the amount of energy unavailable for doing useful work.

It’s not just little boys who gravitate to a state of entropy.

We do it, too.

The bills pile up, the countertop connects clutter, the closet needs purging, and yet entropy trumps energy more often than I want to admit.

I get in my own way of doing useful work.

When I was in college, I thought my life was really complicated.
All those papers!
Exams!
Sorority meetings!
Roommate drama!

Then I got married, and learning how to do life with my soul mate made life even more complicated.

Then we had kids, and as you might have guessed—I discovered the real meaning of complicated. The family dynamic shifted each time we brought home a new baby. Our marriage, jobs, kids, and other obligations all fought for our attention, and like that stack of blocks in my living room, we didn’t always do a great job of keeping it all together.

As we get older, life doesn’t get easier. It just gets more complicated (and weirdly, also more expensive).

But also as I’ve gotten older I crave useful work. I need it.

But how do I make sure the energy for doing that work is available to me?

I’m a big fan of the THREE R’s—rituals, rhythms, and rest.
In fact, I’ve written about those three things here, here, here, and here.

But today I want to talk about something else….

And I know it seems counter-intuitive to add something to an already busy schedule in order to create more order in your life, but remember—we want to increase the energy available for doing useful work, and the the best way to do that is to do something that actually makes us feel energized.

Here’s How:

Get lost in a subject completely outside your scope of knowledge.

I’m reading a book called Buzz that’s all about bees, interesting to me because bees are responsible for nearly 1/3 of the foodstuffs we eat, and also for more than 350 of the 1,000 medical prescriptions cited in the 12th century Book of Medicines. I have no idea how I might apply what I’m learning about bees to future work, but a deep-dive into a subject in which I know so little is sure to spark creative output.

Schedule time to revitalize by doing something you’ve never done before.

Last week, I experienced a sound bath. Never heard of it? Let me explain—it was new to me, too! Essentially, a sound bath is a meditation class that guides you into a deep meditative state while surrounding you in ambient sound played by instructors who use instruments such as bowls, gongs, and cymbals. For a whole hour, I laid on my yoga mat in a warm room and just let the sound “wash” over me. It was glorious.

Meet with someone who inspires you, not because you need anything from them but because you love their company.

I used to be a part of a cohort of small business owners, but when I ended my business last year, I knew it was time to move on. For five years those women functioned as a lifeline for me, and I miss them! Today, I’m making a pact with myself to schedule a lunch with one or two of them. I love learning from people who are different from me in every way—stage of life, type of work, hobbies, or worldview.

Entropy will always play a role in our lives. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, creativity is often born from chaos.

Albert Einstein’s Desk on the day he died.

See what I mean?

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Well, You Never Asked!

“There’s a weird smell in the basement. Can you please find it?”

“Don’t tell me what to do!”
”You’re not the boss of me!”
”Why do I always have to be the one to (fill in the blank)?”

Twenty years ago, that might have been how this conversation went down in our house.

But today, after years of practicing and failing and finally figuring out how this marriage thing works, Gavin said,

“Sure!”

Ok, I’m lying.

He actually said, “Okaaayyyy” and then gave me that frowny-face look that means, “I don’t want to do this, but I will because I love you.”

We didn’t have to play rock-paper-scissors.
No one tried to bargain.
And best of all, no one got upset.

Even though Gavin “claimed” he smelled nothing, I knew for sure something was either rotten, dead, or hiding in the spare bedroom currently occupied by the teenage boy living in our house. Gavin spends the better part of most days at work while spend mine running up and down the stairs to take the dog out to the backyard. (I think I know what the basement is supposed to smell like.)

He agreed to check it out.

In our home, there’s a very clear balance of power:

One in which he does all the stinky stuff.

“Stinky stuff” includes things like cleaning up vomit and sterilizing the trash bin that’s in the garage.

We don’t keep score. It’s just the way things are.

Keeping score would be exhausting.

And besides, keeping score is what you do when you both play for two different teams.

But Gavin and I are on the same team! We’re not competing against each other. We are always working with and for each other.

And that’s why he agreed to scout out the weird smell in the basement without pushing back.

To be honest, I don’t even have the energy for push-come-to-shove kind of arguments. It’s hard enough to manage the energy for all the other stuff I have to do around here.

“Energy:
The capacity to do work”

— My Physics Textbook

Life is work, and anybody who tells you differently is either trying to sell you something or has been retired for entirely too long.

I don’t get up in the morning and go to a regular 9-5, but everyday I do carry something that’s been dubbed “The Mental Load.”

Here’s a funny cartoon that explains it perfectly

The mental load is the total sum of responsibilities that you take on to manage “the remembering of things.” It’s emotional labor, defined by Arlie Hochschild in the 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, as the process of managing emotions and relationships with others in order to be more successful at your job. Moreover, it’s largely invisible.

• Making the dentist appointments

• Buying the groceries

• Doing the laundry

• Scheduling maintenance

• Paying the bills

• Setting the alarms

• Remembering birthdays, anniversaries

• Scheduling social outings

• Researching vacation spots, educational opportunities, summer camps, etc.

• Purchasing gifts

• Coordinating family pictures

• Mailing the holiday cards

The pace and strain of being in charge of all these time-consuming, menial tasks takes its toll. While the perception may be that this invisible work is insignificant, it is hardly inconsequential.

Is there anyone out there who hasn’t felt exhausted, overwhelmed, and burned out because she was responsible for #allthethings?

“To feel valued and valuable is as compelling a need as food. The more our value feels at risk, the more preoccupied we become with defending and restoring it, and the less value we’re capable of creating in the world.”

— Tony Schwartz, CEO, The Energy Project

There’s a feeling among some women that you shouldn’t have to ask for help, that the people that love you, especially your spouse, should inherently “know” what you need and offer to help before being asked.

Let me tell you a secret: Because the mental load is carried in our minds and because no one has yet figured out how to read minds,

Ima gonna have to ask for help when I need it.

The load I carry—so heavy and overwhelming at times—no one ever asked me to carry it. It is a burden I have placed on myself.

I know what you’re thinking:

“If I don’t do all those things, then nothing will ever get done!”

And you might be right. The smell in the basement was bothersome to me, not to anyone else. If I had kept silent, I’d be sitting here tonight pinching my nose and praying for a drop-shipment of Febreeze.

but Don’t let pride be the barrier that keeps you from asking for exactly what you need.

We want things to be fair.
We want things to be even.
But when one spouse begins keeping score everybody loses.
There are no winners.

So where does that leave us?

There’s a saying in our house that we use whenever we’re talking about someone who needs more experience or doesn’t understand something we think she should; we say, “She just needs a few more birthdays.”

And I guess that goes for married people, too.

“We just need a few more anniversaries.”

After awhile, you realize it’s just not worth it to stay silent and hope he figures out that the bed needs made or the dishwasher unloaded or the toilet paper changed.

Just ask.

It takes two seconds!

And I’ve got news for you, things will never be fair. They will never be even. And honestly, I don’t think I would even want it that way.

In a fair world, I would have been the one looking for the weird smell in the basement.

“She who smelt it dealt it,” Am I right?

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