Getting ARGanized: A Tale

This is a story about how Mademoiselle Mishel learned the value of being "Organized," a word that once made her shudder, laugh and tell really lousy jokes.

So: Mademoiselle Mishel lives in a small one-bedroom condo where piles of paper collect on her kitchen counter and the "office" is a dining room table that has more piles of notebooks and binders and where the chair backs are used to hang drying towels, swimsuits, caps and goggles.

In this space she would sit for her weekly Monday coach-training tele-class. Everything was going fine--well, fine-ish. Until one day she sat among her rubble and felt anxious and fidgety and couldn't concentrate. On this day Mlle Mishel conducted a terrible practice coach session on a fellow student, her mind rambling all over the place and she felt generaly out-of-wack the whole time. See? She can't even spell "generally." Poor fellow student.

That's when M.M. felt them: little beings pushing against the walls of her stomach and ribs and kidneys and other innards. These riled-up beings were crowded and pissy; instead of being able to play and create and be productive in all sorts of important ways they were too claustrophobic to move let alone do anything of any meaning. Hence, their owner's propensity for chasing her own tail.

Finally Mlle. Mishel listened to the interior clanging. She saw the piles of messy papers and binders spread over the kitchen counter and her dining room table calling to her for some ORDER in the court.

It was time.

Where did she start--having not a touch of German heritage or any Type-A afflictions? In small places. Instead of cleaning the whole place at once, like her cleaning ladies once lovingly did before this Recessionista era (zoot alors!), she took on small little bits. Like, Windexing everything that is Windex-able (coffee table, mirrors). Next, she got out a hole-puncher collected her class notes and put them in their alloted binders, and put said binders in a place they now belong.

Next, she committed herself to making a working space, aka office.

Office, in a one-bedroom teeny-tiny condo?

Sometimes you just gotta work with what you have. So, she cleared off her dining table, opened it up to its full size, put a frivolous table lamp on a lemon-lime place mat and added a pottery cup filled with pens and markers--and crowned this the official new "bureau."

Already she felt lighter and freer and was ready to commit to a new doable system of being organized so the little crowd of creative brainpower would have space to do their good, fun work. Everyone went to bed that night with a smile on their face (wait, is that another tale?) Anyway--

The moral of the story is: Organizing gave Mlle Mishel something she lives for, really--an anchor from which she can swing and play and create, as she does in this Chagall painting, "Promenade." Ahhh....

So Mlle. Mishel knows this is going to be an ongoing process to build systems that will provide new resources of creativity and productivity.

Did someone just say systems? (Way too advanced for M. Mishel)

However, and here's something tres chic and cool for all of your ARGanizational-challenged types: A two-hour Office Day Spa -- to learn how to be freer and freer; more creative and creative. Happier and happier. Check it out.

PS: On the evil TV in background, Rick Steves keeps saying "stinky cheese!" to a young Prague fellow who exclaims "It's good for you as a man!" -- so Mlle Mishel has to go now).

Au bientot!

A Heart-Shaped To-Do List

For over ten years I've wanted to learn to paint. And I haven't. This past August, while struggling through the bike portion of the Troika half ironman, my happiest moment came to me when I was going to finally learn to paint. Really. In the fall I bought a painting kit, asked artist friends about how to start, talked about it, talked about it, and here's what happened: nothing. Until-- I had a session with a coach as part of my ongoing coach training work. Subject: My sense of, um, overwhelmation at all the projects and things I want to do. Result: me spending a greater portion of the day chasing my tail. This panic is that I'll forget about the Very Important Life Projects due to my weak organizing skills. For example, I "organize" piles of paper by throwing them away without going through them.

So: I came to an idea that I would make an artsy to-do list that I could put somewhere for a constant visual reminder of what I WANT to do right now. Instead of it being a finger-wagging Do-This-Or-Else type of list--written on a piece of paper in my messy handwriting--I'd paint it or color it or do something that would get my ass doing some visual arts and help consider which cool-ass things were calling for attention in the present day -- see, a shift and focus already.

I have this spiffy little painting kit, but I've never painted and didn't feel like reading anything about how to mix colors, use water etc etc. Instead of feeling too frustrated, though, I decided to watch the process of what was going on inside -- I was discovering a way of jumping into something totally new that I'd never done before and at the same time working through what was important enough to get on that To Do list right now.

The first draft was a To-Do list written on regular printer paper in bright multi-colored pastel crayons. A super easy start. I felt about five years old but why not embrace the Beginner? Then I bought some spiral drafting paper that was big enough to play on but not TOO big for a novice who gets easily overwhelmed. I turned to my fave artist Marc Chagall for help and ended up printing out a bunch of his paintings and making a collage and then printing out To Dos and New Learnings/mantras I've started keeping on my personal blog. (e.g., one is "Writing is freedom." I'm all about freedom.)

I made the shape a heart because it's round and sexy and lovely and also reminds me that the Things on my To Do list can all be done from love--activities I've chosen and that are heart-felt. So I put on the TV and got out my scissors and glue and did this collage that resulted in THREE simple To Dos--or Get-to-do's. Don't Forgets.

Hey! Maybe that's what I can call a To Do list; A Forget-Me-Not.

Did I love my piece of art? Not really. It felt childish and silly. But I like the effort behind my heart-list-project, and what it might tell me about my desires and aspirations from its position on my fridge.

What did I get out of it all? When starting something totally new begin with what's comfortable and what you know. Don't judge it. Functional art rocks. I watched how my list of priorities marinated and rose to the surface as I did the project.

The three main items on my Forget-me-not heart collage are all things I really want to do.

So, what is it that you ultimately really want? What is your process to find out a way to unearth three cool forget-me-nots that are not DUTIES, but fun meaningful activities that are tied to your core values?

Have fun, Explorers! What do you come up with?

After midnight

Two nights ago I turned my lights off at 12:30am. I was so pissed off -- up too late to swim in the morning and filled with all these negative thoughts and images, including a future vision of my mom moving in with me and ruining my entire life (which is such a pile of nonsense). Then it hit me. It was after the witching hour of midnight. No good comes from the imaginative mind -- mine, at least--when I'm awake by myself on a week night after midnight. Week night is the key factor; if it's a weekend and I've gone out to do something and I get into bed anywhere around midnight I'm proud of myself, dammit.

Here's what else I noticed: as time marched on -- 11pm (arg) and then toward 11:30 panic started to set in, as though something in me knew if I was awake still at 12am my thoughts were doomed.

So I unset my alarm and got up at 7:30 instead of 5:30 and life continued on beautifully even though I missed swimming which is the ideal way to start the day.

I had the good fortune to sit down with my writer friend Ann T and tell her about my discovery of the post-12am pumpkin-mind. Not only could she relate, Ann (who gets up at 5:45am) has a system for this:

If she's up at 10:30pm, she stops looking at the clock. She has her alarm clock radio in her bathroom and puts a piece of cloth over it so she can't cheat. That way there's nothing to get her anxiety rising as she watches the minutes creep toward crazy time.

And another friend has a similar story about being f'd in the head when she's awake too late. My Aussie cousin Jane used to tell me that if she was up past midnight she was doomed to stay up until at least 3am, and she had a big-ass scientist job to head off to in the morning.

So. The chariot turning into a pumpkin at midnight has new meaning. My mind turns into one of those pumpkins that has been split open with the seeds spilling out on the sidewalk, when I'm up in the wee a.m. hours on a weeknight. But it's a short-lived spooky place. (And maybe it's an icky association with the days of partying down well into the hobgobblin a.m. hours ... but we're so over that). So now it has me thinking about time and clock-watching (I can't wear a watch during any kind of race or my eyes will be glued to it the whole time) --and how about one's personal relationships to a particular time of day? I guess we're talking biorhythms now, but I am never able to read more than three lines about it in any article because of the graphs and squiggly lines on the page. I don't speak graphs and charts.

Last night I took my watch off and don't even know when I fell asleep. So I have the extra freedom of not knowing how tired I could possibly be.

Anyone else have a story about their relationship with time?

Artwork: "Persistence of Memory" aka "Persistencde of Time" by Salvador Dali

... do it ...

Just do it already

My new mantra.

To keep the doggie from chasing her tail.

Just do it already!

Don't try so *&$*(& hard!

Here's a great exerpt from a book I started, "The Inner Game of Work," by Timothy Gallwey (who also wrote Inner Game of Tennis and Golf):

"Two observations stand out as I reflect on my early experience with coaching performance sports. The first is that almost everyone who came to me for a lesson was trying very hard to fix some aspect of their game that they didn't like. They expected me to provide the remedy for their problem. The second is the relative effortlessness with which change for the better took place when they stopped trying so hard and trusted in their capacity to learn from their experience. There was a stark contrast between the forced mode of learning and the natural earnign seen i nthe early development of children."

What would it feel like to trust your experience and loosen your grip on the reigns?

Artwork: "The Dance" by Henri Matisse

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Now, back to our regularly schedule programming, with a quote:

"And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." -- Anais Nin

What on earth is becoming of us?

(Click on image to make it larger, and read it!)

As much as I try to embrace our social networking world I still really struggle with it. Yes, it's amazingly cool to re-connect with old friends through Facebook--and turn acquaintances into friendships. Yes, there are some sightings that are confusing or unnerving (Who-are-you-why-do-you-want-to-be-my-friend-no-I-do-not-remember-you-please-go-away). But Twitter, I just don't get. I can't get past the Who-gives-a-shit/Get-a-life bias. But I'm sure it's all in the writing and if it was great I'd read it. Maybe.

But what happens to humans when they get exponential levels of communication, e.g.: Well, I could wait to see [Insert Name Here] and bave a discussion in-person but also if I drop something in Twitter about how I'm ripping out all the "G's" in my address book and then send a short email that says maybe I'll sell my belongings and move to Peru, then leave a phone message by "replying" to an old voice mail rather than putting in a fresh call--because God forbid I actually have to talk to a live person who could have a say in the conversation--and then I can post that photo on Facebook and change my status to, "[Insert Name Here] is really mad at someone right now"... that should say everything that needs to be said... right?

If I sound resentful it's more that I'm overwhelmed and a bit worried we're going to lose the art of conversation and relating in person. Have you noticed how some people who are introverts are social-network extroverts?

So here I am on my blog having it out with Facebook status reports and loving the Future Man spoof above. Sometimes I see a plane in the sky and wonder what someone like Leonardo DaVinci or George Washington would think if they were on the ground looking up at a metal carcas flying through the air. That, combined with a tour of Facebook and Twitter and they'd combust before returning to their Time Machine.

Thanks to Bill R for the Future Man cartoon.