Messy life
Here was the advice from the counseling suggestion last session:
“Life is messy - allow it to be messy. And I don’t mean just your physical environment”
At the time I kinda thought I knew what this meant, but now that I look at it more I’m not sure what this means.
Ok, so life has a way having things happen at incontinent times, or in ways that do not meet the ideal or even the desire. Sometimes things do happen when we don’t want them to or don’t happen when we do. It’s not neat and clean and scripted and happening according to plans. It’s messy, so accept it. Uuummm I think I’ve been working on that quite well, and accept whatever the new state is quite quickly and with little lasting unhappiness.
So, what does “allow it to be messy” mean here. Don’t go on with accepting? After all the work I have seen counselor doing, I really don’t think that was the lesson.
Or perhaps the problem is “meet the ideal or … desire”. Maybe life is messy, so the plans and ideals are just a waste of time, life - in all it’s glorious messiness- could just be allowed to be. With no expectations there is no need to work on getting back to happy state, because all that happens is accepted as-is and can make for happiness. But this is also the state of being pushed and pulled by the tides - and one of the keys to happiness is a flexible constantly changing vision (not the same as goal - but for me kinda lives in the same realm). So, I don’t think this is quite what she was getting at either.
Maybe she sees me as a “neat freak” always trying to make a place for everything and make everything fit in it’s place. Well, I’m not so good with that in a physical sense, but it is something I like (note, I don’t NEED it - it’s just an ideal or vision - but I don’t want to or need to put enough energy into it to make it happen all the time).
So, do I have this in the non-physical ways? Well sure, it would be lovely if all the different aspects of my life and mental world played together nicely. They don’t, I certainly don’t EXPECT them to, but I do like it and I occasionally decide work toward smoothing over the roughest places. And of course that’s a bunch of what would come up in counseling.
So, if that’s what she’s seeing, then my interpretation of “allow it to be messy” would be to leave the rough spots rough. Of course, I think that I already do leave many of the rough spots rough, so more or all of them rough? Well, I guess I could. I guess eventually the rough spots would do some changing all their own, even if I don’t set about to change them. They’ll do their own thing. I think I have the idea that often rough spots are headed for huge explosion and I decide to work on them to avoid the explosion. Explosion is definitely a form of messy, and makes me extremely uncomfortable waiting around for impending explosion. She also talked about learning from uncomfortableness -so maybe this is where she was going.
Perhaps I could just ask instead of guessing? :)
“Life is messy - allow it to be messy. And I don’t mean just your physical environment”
At the time I kinda thought I knew what this meant, but now that I look at it more I’m not sure what this means.
Ok, so life has a way having things happen at incontinent times, or in ways that do not meet the ideal or even the desire. Sometimes things do happen when we don’t want them to or don’t happen when we do. It’s not neat and clean and scripted and happening according to plans. It’s messy, so accept it. Uuummm I think I’ve been working on that quite well, and accept whatever the new state is quite quickly and with little lasting unhappiness.
So, what does “allow it to be messy” mean here. Don’t go on with accepting? After all the work I have seen counselor doing, I really don’t think that was the lesson.
Or perhaps the problem is “meet the ideal or … desire”. Maybe life is messy, so the plans and ideals are just a waste of time, life - in all it’s glorious messiness- could just be allowed to be. With no expectations there is no need to work on getting back to happy state, because all that happens is accepted as-is and can make for happiness. But this is also the state of being pushed and pulled by the tides - and one of the keys to happiness is a flexible constantly changing vision (not the same as goal - but for me kinda lives in the same realm). So, I don’t think this is quite what she was getting at either.
Maybe she sees me as a “neat freak” always trying to make a place for everything and make everything fit in it’s place. Well, I’m not so good with that in a physical sense, but it is something I like (note, I don’t NEED it - it’s just an ideal or vision - but I don’t want to or need to put enough energy into it to make it happen all the time).
So, do I have this in the non-physical ways? Well sure, it would be lovely if all the different aspects of my life and mental world played together nicely. They don’t, I certainly don’t EXPECT them to, but I do like it and I occasionally decide work toward smoothing over the roughest places. And of course that’s a bunch of what would come up in counseling.
So, if that’s what she’s seeing, then my interpretation of “allow it to be messy” would be to leave the rough spots rough. Of course, I think that I already do leave many of the rough spots rough, so more or all of them rough? Well, I guess I could. I guess eventually the rough spots would do some changing all their own, even if I don’t set about to change them. They’ll do their own thing. I think I have the idea that often rough spots are headed for huge explosion and I decide to work on them to avoid the explosion. Explosion is definitely a form of messy, and makes me extremely uncomfortable waiting around for impending explosion. She also talked about learning from uncomfortableness -so maybe this is where she was going.
Perhaps I could just ask instead of guessing? :)