Green Oasis

I’ve recently found a secret to getting myself to do stuff. The idea of cringe busting my to do list has made me aware of the sneaky feeling of panic that makes me want to procrastinate.

Not only does each item on my task list threaten to freak me out, the whole assemblage drives me to fiddle with addictive games and madness. I take one look at my task list and my eyes glaze over: I don’t know where to start.

The obvious strategy is to start at the top. You know that and I know that, but my gut reactions don’t. They tell me to head for the life rafts and abandon all hope. “The list is too long!”

I have a homebrew task management system (cobbled together using big ass text files, Bash scripting, and Vim). I recently programmed it to be able to give me exactly one task at a time.

The effect is magical.

My task list has lost its power to intimidate. “Sure, I have 15 minutes to create that spreadsheet. Easy-peasy!” I find myself ripping through my tasks so fast that I don’t know what to do with all the time left over.

Multitasking is a moral weakness. One task at a time. One. Task.

Why do I long for free time yet feel lost when I achieve it?

I last read The Old Man and the Sea for seventh grade reading class. What a difference twenty years make! While I’m not yet old, some lessons come only with time: they can’t be rushed. The consciously futile struggle against mortality enriches our stark, youthful views into compassionate, full color vistas.

My little experiment in reclaiming my time and focus got me thinking about the time I spend reading blogs. I’ve been a lot more productive in my non-blog life now that I’ve ignored 168 Mormon-related items in my feed reader in the last two weeks. I’m now also reconsidering many of the other blogs that I read.

To be fair, I also wondered what value I’m providing to the literally dozens of you who read my blog. I’m not sure my own blog would make the cut on my team anymore. It’s losing the focus that brought many of you here in the first place. This change in focus mirrors my own, so I won’t do anything to prevent that. C’est la vie.

I would also like the freedom to litter my blog with random thoughts and miscellany that would certainly be of little interest to you. I hesitate to decrease the signal-to-noise ratio because I respect you and your time. You should be doing better things with your life than wading through my stupid random thoughts.

So I’ve created a “Signal” feed which will only include the stuff that I’ve put time and thought into, stuff that I suspect might enrich your life. You can safely ignore the rest.

I just got back from a funeral.

It caused me to think, as funerals tend to do. The man who died and the services held in his honor were emblematic of my relationship to Mormonism.

The man who died was the bishop to whom I first confessed my sins. He tried to help me the best he knew how, but our shared belief in Mormonism got in our way. Instead of telling me that I was acceptable just exactly as I was, he tried to help fix me, to help me meet an arbitrary standard. Though he was kindhearted, our interaction led to years of heartbreak.

Everything in my life has been a mixture of good and bad.

Going to the funeral was a homecoming. The church was the same building where I spent long hours in stake conference as a child and where I attended my freshman year of early morning seminary. The people that I saw were the faces of my childhood: teachers, leaders, old friends, people whom I haven’t seen in years, people with a smiles of recognition when they see me, everyone a little older and worn down by life. The lilt and rhythm of Mormon thought weaved itself through the entire occasion and helped to impart to my mind a sense of timelessness. So many parts of my life were connected in this moment. My childhood folded in on the present moment.

I appreciate Mormon funerals. Because they sincerely believe that they will see their family and friends again, their funerals take on the air of a somewhat melancholy family reunion. I don’t share their hope for a continuation of life after death, but I want my funeral to celebrate that life goes on. Saying goodbye is the inevitable price of building relationships. We can’t have the one without the other.

I sat listening to stories about his life mixed in with assertions of supernatural miracles and certainty for unjustified beliefs. I briefly wished that we could dispense with the nonsense and focus on who the man was. However, these beliefs were part of him. They were an appropriate part of his funeral because he received a sense of meaning from them. Even though my feelings about Mormonism range from ambivalence to repugnance, if I wanted to acknowledge this man as a friend, I had to make peace with the parts of him that I dislike.

I can’t say that I willingly accept the bad with the good. But what choice do I have when the two are inseparable?