Working with what you've got

Today’s blog is about making plans and executing them. I’ve been working on this for two and a half hours now, and I’m not making very good progress. Making a plan and then executing it is such a struggle for me. I’m now letting the ideas flow instead of trying to plan out what this blog should be. I always accomplish more when I can “go with the flow” instead of trying to plan out what I’m going to do. If going with the flow would encompass everything that needs to get done in order to live a healthy and productive life, then I’d be set. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

It was an effort to change this way of living that brought about my downward spiral. I had been getting up every day, fostering up my courage, going off to work, and then escaping to the refuge of being home alone. For a long time, I didn’t question whether this was a satisfactory life. But a few years ago, I started experiencing some feelings of light-headedness at work. Looking up my symptoms on the internet, I saw that this was a sign of pre-diabetes. Frightened, I started changing my eating habits. Eventually, I started feeling more energetic, and I started working out. As I started feeling better physically, I started taking assessment of my life, and I did not like what I saw. I knew that this was a sorry life, and I wanted to change it.

About this time, I started teaching physical science and chemistry. Now, it had been 30 years since I had chemistry. I had vague memories of electron levels, acids, bases, and types of chemical reactions. I definitely had my work cut out for me, learning and relearning one step ahead of my students. I got the textbooks a couple of days before I started teaching, not much time to prepare. I was starting in the middle of the school year, and I didn’t even know what the students had already learned.

It was good for me that I could go with the flow and change strategies as I go along. And it wasn’t the first time I started a job without any adequate training for the job. A CPA firm hired me as a full charge bookkeeper because I had good math skills. I floundered around, getting bits of help here and there until I figured out what I was supposed to be doing. So, I had the courage to jump off into the great unknown.

It wasn’t the teaching so much as it was other things like remembering the students’ names, documentation, getting the technology to work, and discipline procedures that drained off my energy. Then it was home to find out what I was supposed to teach next, relearn what I had forgotten, figure out a way to teach it, and find or prepare handouts. Then, it was off to school early each morning to make copies, hoping the copy machine would work.

Oh, yeah. I was determined to live a more meaningful life. The school instituted a twenty minute reading period once a week. During that time, I read The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield. He gives great advice, but for me, at that time, his book was an indictment of what I was not doing. Maybe it was a bad time to be reading it. At any rate, I had been struggling to keep my life together for a long time, and now it had become a battle just to get through each day. My resources were being depleted.

By the time I started teaching the following year, I had set aside Canfield’s book. My interest wasn’t in living a more meaningful life, but in just surviving.

When the winds of change blow, some people build windmills, and others build fences.