Chasing my tail...help me stop the World?!

I've got to get this little soap box rant out of my system, it's been weighing me down for weeks.

"Do what you've got to do...then do what you want to do". One of the good 'ol refrains I remember ringing out in our house when I was younger. (Hi Dad!) In the past I was a dreadful procrastinator and would pretty much always do exactly the reverse of what I was told. This meant I never did much but what I felt like. Ha, to think of it now! I've grown up a bit and realised recently that I've been inadvertently following Pops' sage advice.

These days I get a great deal of pleasure just doing the things that need doing. The main tasks I refer to are related to food (buying, preparing, cleaning up the mealtime debris!) and housework (washing, more washing, washing again, tidying up). However satisfying I find the act of "doing", the sticking point for me seems to be that if I ALWAYS do what I "have" to do, I would very rarely get to the stuff I want to do. Sometimes I just have to let some things (that should probably be done) slip, otherwise my sanity would really suffer.

The housework I do is pretty much the bare minimum I feel I can get away with, I must stress I am NOT ironing tea towels and knickers, or anything else for that matter. I would actually love to have more time to be able to be a "better" housekeeper, scrubbing my doorstep daily and washing windows week in week out. But even now, just scratching the surface of what my inner flylady would love to tick off the task list, I struggle to keep up. When I add the demands of my (very demanding) children to this, I begin to see why for weeks now I have had very little time to myself to.....ummmm....write here and do all the other things I'd like to do be doing. Things like yoga, sewing, my little art projects, tinkling at the piano, reading...it's a long list.

Marshall Rosenberg talks about re-phrasing the way we think about things we find unpleasant in terms of choice. So, instead of thinking "ugh....now I have to clean the kitchen" , I would think more along the lines of "I really want to do some yoga right now but the kitchen is a bomb site and I really need it to be clean in the morning so I can prepare breakfast peacefully and with ease, so now I am choosing to clean the kitchen".

For me, thinking in terms of choices like this does make it easier to accept the elements of repetition and drudgery in my life. It also validates me if I decide to choose NOT to do the tasks at hand. But it's also just an intellectual distinction! It doesn't change the fact my family needs feeding, or that there is crap everywhere and someone at some time, usually me, will have to sort it out. I can't compromise my standards when it comes to fresh, nutritious food, and I'm not prepared to walk about in stinky dirty clothes.....how could I? So is there really a choice? Unfortunately thinking differently doesn't magic up home help or make extra hours in the day.

So, I'm mostly doing what I have to do (happily), but I need a way of finding more time for things I'd really like to do. Any ideas?

It's a mad world

I've been asking myself how people can seem to care so little about things these days.

Lots of little things are really bothering me. Litter, our neighbour's overflowing household dustbins (left in the street for days after the binmen have been), more litter, broken glass, dog poo, people scowling at each other instead of smiling. I saw a bloke cycling along and just hop off his bike, suddenly dropping it (hard) to the floor to go into a shop. Just left it there right in the middle of the pavement for everyone to walk around. Didn't care about his bike or the folks tripping over it one jot....if anyone had said something to him he would probably have seen his arse.

And here I am, religiously picking up the dog turd, being polite to everyone, taking home other people's litter as well as our own. Slavishly rinsing out our plastic bottles and tetrapaks, creating a smelly stinking mess in our alley so I can duly recycle this stuff. Taking my cardboard to the tip, encouraging the fruit flies to well and truly colonise our house by having a compost heap within cat-swinging distance of the back door. Why?

I just couldn't not do/be all these things, as thankless as putting in the extra effort is. It's hard to keep "being the change" I want to see in the world (Thanks Ghandi for giving us this one to cling to).

As I spend more and more time with other, fabulous, like-minded people, I'm becoming more and more staunch about these things I've always had strong feelings about. Vegetarianism..heck I'm seriously considering going vegan. Breastfeeding: always knew it was the best way but I seem to be becoming some sort of evangelist. The environment: don't get me started. This is good, I think. But creating some difficult conflicts in my life and how I manage to live in such an imperfect world. Perhaps those of us who can actually see the sh*t all just have to grit our teeth keep on being that change....?