Natural Inclination

All pictures taken with my Samsung Tablet.

My oldest granddaughter is a mini me.  Her mom, my daughter, is constantly trying to motivate with prompting, prodding, and cajoling her to get things done.  Putting her toys away requires arranging everything just so.  Her favorite giraffes, collected over her 13 years of life, must be arranged properly.

Her dolls must be in the proper dress, their hair coiffed, positioned in a certain way surrounded by accessories.  Her personal items are on display.  Her bed is a beautiful display piece.  In fact, everything she does is done in a slow, studied, deliberate manner.

As you can imagine, everything takes a lot of time.  Writing a sentence or paragraph for a school assignment takes forever, because she needs the perfect topic and thought to express.

This is not slacking.  This is not being lazy.  Everything she does, must meet the vision of her aesthetic.  Everything must be as perfect as she can make it.  I so want to take this burden from her.  Sometimes, good enough is enough.

This loving, thoughtful, considerate, artistic child, is often moved to tears with the pressure to get things done.

When she does anything, she does it completely, with no short cuts.

I find myself doing the same thing.  Recently, I’ve been rebelling.  Instead of sorting the forks by kind and size, I just toss them in together.  The t-shirts, normally turned with each one added to the pile so it won’t tip over, are just getting stacked, and they have no room to tip laying in the dresser drawer.  But I will admit, it doesn’t feel right.

You might think I’m meticulous.  No!  I don’t have anyone to motivate, prompt, prod, and cajole me.   It is just too exhausting to do everything to that standard!  Instead, I do nothing, letting the clutter pile up, and things go undone.

I follow the 80/20 Rule for every day chores.  The 80/20 Rule tells us that 80 percent of the work is accomplished with 20 percent of the effort.  The remaining 20 percent, to really get things fully completed, take 80 percent of your time.

When I really want to get things done properly, I give it the entire 100 percent.  (This may be why I have yet to write a book.)  When I finally do set about a project, everything is so nice.

This is a tendency we can’t control.  The best we can do, is not let it control us.

 

(Happy Birthday sweetie!  Thank you for letting me use your room.  Your party was great.)