Going With the Flow

This morning I woke up early, around 4:30, which seems to be the time my internal clock has recently decided should be the hour when I spring from bed, eagerly anticipating the wonders of a new day.   Or something like that.  I had decided last night that since I had been to the gym the past three mornings, I should take a break this morning and sleep in a little, say until about 6:00.  Since that plan didn't work out, I decided that I would just go to work a bit early instead, and get in a little extra time.  That way, I would be able to take a little comp time on Friday, when I plan to get a head start on my Christmas vacation.

So, I got myself ready and went to work.  I got there at 6:52, which is 38 minutes earlier than my normal start time.  My plan was to add those 38 minutes to the extra time I had already worked this pay period and use it all on Friday.   (The point to this fascinating narrative is coming soon, I promise.) 

Usually, I eat a breakfast sandwich at my desk after I get to work, thus maximizing my productivity by not wasting a lot of time on trivial things like eating.   I also normally transport some of my morning medications in a little pill holder and take them with my breakfast, as directed by my physician and pharmacist.  ("Take this medication with food.")  Well, today when I looked in my briefcase for my pill holder, it wasn't there.  This could mean only one thing:  I had forgotten to take any of my morning medications!  

I should probably mention at this point that one of the things that I pride myself in is being organized.  I do not forget to do the things I am supposed to do.  I make a plan and I execute it in the most efficient way possible.  If there are errands to be run, I decide on the most direct route to take to avoid things like doubling back and wasting time and gas.  Once I have formulated my plan, I am more than a little reluctant to deviate from it.  In fact, if a need arises to stray from the path I have set before myself for the day, it often causes me extreme stress, and leads to my berating myself for screwing up.  If I were being completely honest, I would have to say that I am slightly OCD, and that I am too uptight about things that don't go the way I plan them. 

 So, anyway, I had a choice to make.  I could forget about the medications, or I could go back home (what?) and take them.  Now if you are blessed enough to be unaware that one of the joys of being middle-aged is the need to take a bunch of medications to, you know, avoid an untimely death,  you might think that not taking those pills wouldn't be such a big deal. And I have actually missed taking my morning meds a few times and did not realize it until I got home in the evening, so I probably wouldn't have died today without them. Probably. 

To tell the truth, until recently, I would almost certainly have risked death today rather than change what I had planned to do.  Go back home?  Drive 20 minutes both ways after having already driven it once today?  Waste all that gas and time?  No way.  Not in the plan.  Not gonna happen.  Or, if I had decided that I probably ought to try to make sure to live at least until Friday, when the world is scheduled to end,  deciding to change my plans, to screw up my whole day, and to do all that redundant driving, that decision would have brought me huge amounts of stress, including a headache, a stiff neck, a distressed stomach, and general misery. 

However, I recently found an article on line called "Tips on How to Become a Calmer Person."  I found this article because I Googled, "how to become a calmer person," having realized that some of the my personal traits, which are strengths in the area of accomplishing goals, do not always allow me to, shall we say, be kind to myself.  In fact, I tend to drive myself crazy stressing over things that I can't control.  That article is worth your time, but if you don't want to bother, I will share some of the points that most got my attention:

1.  It is important to accept that things will not always go as we planned in life.   (Shocking, I know, but true.)
2.  There is no point worrying over something that you cannot control.  My amplification of that idea is that you aren't being irresponsible if you don't worry.
3. Most of the things we worry about or get stressed out about turn out to be not as bad as we expected.
4. If you think of yourself as a calm person, you are more likely to be one.
5. A calm mind can resolve almost any situation, whereas a stressed mind only makes things worse.

So this morning when the Horror of the Forgotten Meds occurred,  I decided to put some of these principals into action.  I realized that of course I should go home and take my meds,  that it was only a big deal if I thought it was, and I could change my plans for the day without completely unraveling.  I calmly left my office, headed home, and did what I had to do.  Going both ways, I concentrated on not freaking out.  I heard some great songs on the radio, and on the way back to the office, when I was heading east, I saw a beautiful Oklahoma sky, streaked with red and pink and blue and purple as the sun came up.  If I hadn't altered my plan for the day, I would have missed those songs and that spectacular sky.
That sky seems an apt metaphor about some other things I have been thinking about lately, things that are more important than my plans for a given day.  One of the things I have noticed about getting older, about being closer to geezerhood than I care to admit, is that my reactions to the world recently have not exactly been positive.   It is easy for older people to view the world with disdain, with disapproval, and disappointment that things haven't turned the way they had planned, the way they expected.   Recently, I have been disturbed by conditions and events that may disturb you as well.  I am extremely concerned about our dysfunctional Federal government, about the divisions in our country, about the fact that our society and our culture seem to be disintegrating, about the prevalence of violence, and a million other things that tell me the world is not what I thought it would be, not what I wanted it to be in my later years.

When I was a teenager learning to drive, my mother told me that it often best to go with the flow of traffic.  As an example, if you can get where you are going by making a right turn with the flow of traffic rather than trying to turn left against the flow of the traffic nearest you, going with the flow is easier and generally safer.   I have come to realize, that while I believe my concerns about the world today are legitimate, it is important to remember rule number 1 above, that things don't always go as we had planned.   Hating what the world has become does not change it.

For me, going with the flow does not mean passively accepting the world and my life as it is.  I still have the responsibility to try to improve things in whatever ways possible, such as by voting for candidates I believe will improve things, by supporting causes important to me, and by trying to bridge divisions between people when I can.  However, I don't have to let the fact that the world disappoints me rob me of my peace of mind.  What if I'm wrong?  What if the world only seems so bad to me because of when I was born, and the attitudes I developed back in the Last Millennium?  And even if the world is truly as bad as it seems to me, what good does it do to be consumed by that?  If I relax and take things as they come, if I go with the flow as much as I can, will I see a beautiful sky I hadn't expected?  Maybe.