Sitting outside the door twiddling your thumbs

I entered the date this morning as I began my journal and it said October 22. It’s not the 22nd. It’s the 23rd. Yesterday I thought it was Wednesday. It was Thursday. Some days, everything feels off. Today is Friday and I’m going to meet my new client. It feels “off” to start a job on a Friday.

Some posts back I talked about taking an assisted living, companioning job. I was indecisive about taking it, and worried the client would depend on me so that, when I was ready to leave the job and get on with my writing life, I wouldn’t feel free to do it. I didn’t want a job I had to commit to. Then I got my first client.

She started trying to get rid of me almost from the day I arrived. The companionship was her family’s idea. She didn’t feel she needed me. She liked me, but she fired me three times before the family and the agency agreed to move on. By the end of the assignment it had grown absolutely hilarious. There was this day, for instance, when I sat outside her apartment door until a friend of hers saw me and went to get her away from a party.

I had all kinds of feelings about the sanctity of the home and the client’s right to choose. I didn’t want to be forced on her. She wanted to handle things one way; her family and the agency another. I was in the middle. But it turned out just plain funny (in a sweet way), a comedy of errors, and everyone was feeling pretty light about it.

I’ve been being shown lately that my worries can be foolish, and that it’s better to act than worry. I can’t always do it though. Can’t always follow what the squares on my calendar tell me to do. Can’t always make my own decision without considering a number of others. Things don’t always work out immediately. Sometimes you sit outside the door twiddling your thumbs.

Sometimes things feel heavy before they feel light.

Someone told me that the middle of change is hardest. I found that interesting, and most likely true. The beginning of change can be kind of exciting, or so startling, or sudden that it has a certain energy. By the end of a change, I suppose it’s not feeling so much like a change anymore, but more like a beginning. But in the middle….

I got a reply from Nouk Sanchez the other day (she’s in Belgium now). It was a response to my question about how much her efforts helped her success along. She told me (among other things) that she’s an introvert, and that radio and television appearances were particularly effortful for her, but that they were also exciting.

I wondered…Was that the beginning? Or the middle? Is the middle when you’re trying to find the new skills for the change that has begun?

I’ve been running with this idea a little bit, the combined idea of worry and change/beginning, middle and end. Is the worry the beginning, and the time when you write to people you don’t know asking, “Can you help me?” the middle?

But here’s the thing. I asked my daughter the other day – “What if you replaced the word “worry” with the word “sensitivity?” I’m very sensitive to what’s happening around me – to other people’s needs – and to my own. As you might imagine, when this appears as worry, it gets on other people’s nerves, not to mention mine. I’m “accused” of being a worrier. The atmosphere gets very heavy.

I don’t know that my daughter bought it, but it might help me to think of it this way, and to reframe my language and actions around the idea.

Financial worries are a kind of sensitivity – maybe a sensitivity you have to the consequences of your inability to act.

The times when you’re trying to find a balance, like the one between the writing life you love and a job that pays, are also a bit about the sensitivity you might have to different needs: the practical ones and the inner ones, yours and those of your partner or family.

Sensitivity was the truth of the situation with my first client. I was sensitive to her feelings of being forced. Then I heard the story from the other side: there were needs the client’s family were feeling; there were medical needs that the prudent nurse on staff didn’t want to have become critical needs. So I didn’t refuse to go back after I was fired the first and second times. I went back. I sat outside the door. I wondered if I was doing the right thing.

Is that rightfully labeled worry? Are we meant to always know the right way to go? Or do we sometimes have to wait and be patient with our conflicting concerns.

Couldn’t it be sensitivity, when you put marketing on the calendar, and then also have to find the ways to market that don’t feel “off?”

I’m pretty sure most writers and spiritual folks are sensitive by nature. We’re open. We observe. We get a sense of what’s going on beneath and beyond what appears to be. I’m not certain – I’m just noodling the idea – but just maybe, if we saw this trait as something other than worry, it might be a lot less heavy, let in a little light from time to time, and even rev up the speed through which we pass the hard middle of change.