Hiding, continued

Hi Reader,

Nearly missing my last email was a good learning experience. Younger me would have been embarrassed, but while I found it humbling, I’m giving myself plenty of grace. I’m under some new constraints, and growing into that. So I can acknowledge myself for that while also noticing that despite my best intentions, I don’t always keep my word. But, well, I don’t always bring the best of intentions, either.

I had to laugh at the situation because some of what I wrote last week was the most heartfelt stuff I’d written in a long while. I’ve been feeling very cracked open lately. Probably the birth of my son is part of that, but also some of the work I’ve been doing on myself seems to be starting to bear fruit.

I wrote last time about the tendency to hide. When I pay Attention, I often notice myself daydreaming about the way I wish things were, instead of taking responsibility for how I am creating them. This happens even in my sleep.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, feeling openhearted and articulate. I can’t get back to sleep unless I get up and capture some of what’s running through my head. I generally take this writing to be some of my most honest, because I’m not fully awake to pick it apart and make it sound good for you, or whomever I imagine my reader might be. The other night I wrote this: “we study for knowledge, yes, but more importantly to crack ourselves open in one another’s presence.”

I like this. It connects some of my recent thinking about not-hiding with this desire for study, which is something I seem to be on the verge of seriously committing to.

My timing, as seems to be usual for me, is atrocious. Committing to study with two babies at home? When will I have time for that? I probably won’t, not anytime soon. I will steal moments here and there, as I do to write you these emails. I’ll make you a promise for these next couple weeks, though.

One of the things I’ve been trying to learn is some powerful ways to handle all these competing priorities and commitments in my life right now. Fatherhood and family are the most important, but after that which things will I let interrupt which other things? Currently, for the most part, I make this decision on autopilot (so to some extent it’s not me making it at all, but some unexamined part of me that just ended up the way it ended up). It causes no small amount of stress and feeling burdened in my life. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

So my commitment to you in the next couple weeks is that I will begin to deliberately answer the question of how I handle the fact that there are more things I want to get done in any given day than I have time to do.

There. That’s at least a little bit of not-hiding.

Anything you want to commit to over these next two weeks? Feel free to reach out and let me know.