On Becoming a Curator Of My Life
There are two separate processes in the BARE program where the focus of the work is to let go of things which 1) no longer serve us or 2) actively deplete us mentally or physically. This can be a surprisingly difficult task. We hold on to so much, I suppose in an attempt to maintain stability, to convince ourselves that we are okay because of sameness, to ensure ourselves that while the whole world is changing at a million miles a minute, we are standing on solid ground.
This work was difficult for me. I didn’t want to evaluate the things in my home, even though I could sense that their number was too great for my sense of well-being. I didn’t want to evaluate my time commitments and my relationships to see if they were more than draining. I REALLY didn’t want to go into my closet and be honest about what clothes didn’t fit and which I didn’t like and probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place (the self-judgment about wasting money is perhaps the most fun part). I didn’t want to do any of that, but I did, and it paid off in spades. How?
My stress level went down as I became a curator of the things in my environment rather than just an acceptor of all things. My stress level decreased as I became more honest about the amount of time I wanted to spend on various pursuits and in various relationships. My happiness and confidence went up as I got rid of clothes that made me feel dumpy and as stained as a toddler Mom and replaced them with clothes that made me feel my best, helped me express how I WANT to look, not just what’s in my closet. Letting go of that which no longer served in my physical world has been a game changer.
The interesting thing is that performing those purges has helped to create a mindset that has made me a more careful consumer, planner, and doler-outer of my time. I really have begun to curate my experiences. I have begun to question how I’m spending my time and what I’m getting for it. And I’m making some changes that will exchange unpleasant time for time that will satisfy me.
And here I come to the issue of my garden… not my garden as in English garden with flowers and such, but my vegetable garden. We moved into this house 10 years ago and I have attempted to grow vegetables every year since (although I should note that if you are an aspiring gardener, buying a house in a neighborhood that has street names with “Slate Hill” in them is probably not a great move). We have had a few good years. Even those years, however, did not produce as much as they SHOULD have based on the amount of effort required. Why?
Our yard backs up to a protected woods that has a creek running through it. It is a magical place that we explore with the kids. We find critters, we wade, we take long walks and make up stories about what goes on at night. That woods backs up to a very large county park, which connects to other parks in our fairly rural and wooded county. What does all of this mean, other than that we live in a beautiful spot (which we really, really do)? It means our yard is part of a vast wildlife highway. We have groundhogs; we have rabbits; we have squirrels; we have even had a black bear. And the deer, please don’t get me started on the deer. I know all of you gardeners out there are chomping at the bit to give me advice on how to keep them out. Whatever you’re about to say, short of enclosing the whole thing in chain link fencing including a roof, which would be the only way to keep the squirrels from stealing my tomatoes, we’ve tried it. We’ve done everything short of shooting and poisoning them, which I’m not willing to do. For everything I grow in my garden, assuming the plants thrive, we might get 20% of the harvest. And I haven’t even talked about the bugs.
Being near the creek makes us a prime target for SO many pests. And again, short of spraying things that I’m not comfortable eating, we’ve tried it. We’ve tried it all and I am weary. I am tired of being disappointed when I go out to tend to my garden. This is not the experience I had in mind. There has been little fulfillment in the whole operation, and so I have decided that this year will be my last in carrying out this size of effort (I have a big garden). I haven’t yet decided if I will simply make a much smaller garden of things that do well here or stop the enterprise altogether. I do know that some flowering plants would make a nice addition to part of the yard that the garden covers up. That would feel good to me. And that’s the thing, right? These chores we assign ourselves should get us SOMETHING we feel good about, right? I am going to curate my yard so I can be in it and feel GOOD instead of disappointed or like I am a rotten gardener. I want to enjoy my space. I get to decide how to spend my time and what kind of results I want.
What part of your life could use a little curating? What are you accepting that is not yours? What are you committing to that is draining you? What used to be fun and now is, well, not? What’s in your closet? If you need a personal guide who can teach you how to be a better curator, I’d love to help.
My Mom and Stepdad have decided to move, and there’s a big downsize as part of that move. When we gathered on Easter, lots of stuff got distributed. I walked away with a mishmash of things including a box of CDs. On my way back to their house this past Friday to help clean out the cellar, I popped in one of them, John Denver’s Back Home Again. This album played a big part in my musical childhood. As my kids watched Percy Jackson and the whatever whatever whatever in the back (with headphones) I sang childhood John Denver songs at the top of my lungs. Both “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” and “Grandma’s Feather Bed” are on that particular album and I chuckled to myself as I remembered his appearance on The Muppets singing those songs. If I’ve lost you completely because you are too young for any of this, you might want to plug the feather bed song into YouTube. I remember that Muppets appearance being pretty awesome.
When I was a teenager, some research study must have been released about “quality time.” There grew to be a general agreement that it was not as important HOW much time you spent with a loved one as whether or not that time was QUALITY time. Suddenly we were all very worried about having important bonding time with people we cared about. What I find fascinating is that we’ve never, at least as a culture, applied the same standard to time with ourselves. There seems to be no general agreement that the time we spend with ourselves should 1) actually happen and 2) be quality time; in fact, you rarely hear people talk about “the time you spend with yourself.” It’s really curious if you start to think about it. All of our conversations about relationship and how to spend time appropriately to nurture those relationships have to do with everyone else. Don’t we need to spend time, and not just any old time but QUALITY time with ourselves? Don’t we need to know who WE are and take care of that person? 
It got me to wondering how we can be SO okay with looking with such great scrutiny and intensity at our faces and then refuse to look at the rest of us in the mirror at all. And notice I say “we” here, because this is something I totally used to do, avoid eye to body contact. The objection here is: “But you look great,” and that objection has absolutely nothing to do with what goes on in MY head. For years I did not actually look at myself in a mirror that showed more than my face while undressed because the critic in my head was OUT OF CONTROL. What other people saw was of little interest to me. It was what SHE saw, that mean girl in my head, that had worn me down over time. Better to avoid her altogether by not looking and getting dressed early in the shower to rest of world progression. 
I’ve been spending too much time on social media, listening to the news a lot, quickly reading and sharing an awful lot of information. It’s gotten to me, pushed me over the brink a little. And truth is, there’s plenty going on in the world every day about which we could justifiably feel pushed over the brink.
And yes, I’m telling you I’m working on surrendering, which is hilarious, and is so exactly me. I am so bad at surrender, that I think I have to work at it.
No matter how we arrange our lives, there will be occasions when somebody drops a bomb. We get horrible news. We are betrayed or hurt by a loved one. We discover something we wish we had never known. We lose someone we care about. There are so many ways for this to happen and they’re all out there, those universe bombs. They are out there because no matter how we arrange our lives, and no matter how internally healthy we are, there is an awful lot out there that is simply out of our control. The question is not whether or not a single life will include these universe bombs, but what we do when they fall.
This morning I had the pleasure of singing a song that cuts through so very much noise, which is a funny thing to say, that a song cut through the noise. The first line of the song is “Listen more often to things than to beings…” The song goes on to describe that the people we love who pass on are never really gone. They live on in the world all around us. And if we listen, we can hear them. My musical partner and I sang it for our church service.
“It’s about the journey, not the destination.”