Category: Intentionality

Intentionality, Photography, Pictures & Words Challenge, Writing Prompt

Pictures & Words Day 20: Treat Yourself

Carrie Sue Barnes

Photo/Writing Prompt: A Cool Drink

This afternoon I’m having a few hours of a “Treat Yourself” day. My fellow Parks & Rec fans understand. Keeping the day more affordable than the spending sprees of Donna & Tom, I have indulged myself in a haircut (which, let’s be honest, ladies, is essentially a mini spa treatment). I am currently sipping this cool drink, pleasing to the palate, while I read a book (a sweet treat of the finest variety). Soon I will leave for my appointment for an hour long massage. If you listen closely, you can probably hear my sigh of anticipation through your screen.

The funny thing is that the plans for this afternoon of enjoying a few just-for-me treats motivated me to make the whole day good. After a short, restless night of sleep, I awoke ready to move. Rather than another day of putting off my intention of a morning workout, I changed out of my pajamas, grabbed my sneakers and weights, and headed to the living room to work up a sweat in the quiet of the early morning. A welcome extension of this, I had a renewed desire to eat healthfully today instead of taking up my old habit of considering unhealthy food to be one of the primary ways I can “treat myself.” Good breakfast; good lunch. I wore one of my favorite, most comfortable outfits. I made sure to laugh with both of my kids in the short time we had together before leaving home for the day. I kissed my husband a few extra times.

Maybe an ordinary day holds more opportunities to treat yourself [well] than I realized before.

Intentionality

Filling Your Own Cup

Carrie Sue Barnes

Every workday, a colleague and I walk around the large parking lot on our morning and afternoon breaks. If the weather is unpleasant, we walk the pedestrian pathway in the plant attached to our office area. Interrupting the workday with a little exercise and usually fresh air has become a beneficial routine for me. It energizes my body and mind to return to my tasks after the 15 minutes away. Today, my coworker admitted she sometimes feels guilty for taking our walking breaks, knowing the work that could be continued or completed during that time. As I have never felt this way about our breaks (though certainly I’ve skipped them on occasion to get through a project), my reply to her was, “I don’t think anyone should ever feel guilty for taking care of themselves.”

We sit on our rears for 8+ hours a day, giving our contribution to the productivity and profits of the company. Many in my department work through lunch, eating at their desks or not eating at all. The idea that we ought to feel badly about taking 15 minutes in the morning and the afternoon to refresh ourselves is absurd to me. But the American office’s expectations is not the topic at hand.

What I realized after I made that statement to my colleague was that outside of taking those walking breaks, I do not follow my own advice! At least once a day, sometimes more, I feel guilty for exactly that reason.

Sit down to read a book after the kids are in bed? No way, there are dishes to wash!
Exercise after dinner? I’d be telling my husband I don’t want to spend my little bit of free time with him!
Take a walk or bike ride on Saturday morning? Heck no, there’s laundry to do!
Fix myself a healthy meal that my family isn’t going to enjoy? That would be rude! I should eat what I have made for them and be satisfied.
Take five minutes to pray before tending to the kids’ needs, whatever they may be? Of course not, they’re waiting for me!

I am terrible at allowing myself to take care of me. Now some of it is laziness, absolutely. A lot of it though, is guilt. I get filled with unnecessary guilt, convinced that if I do these things for my physical and mental well being, I will slip below my standards as a wife and mother. Yet when I neglect these matters, I have less energy and clarity. I lose my patience more easily. I feel ugly and uncomfortable in my own skin, disappointed in myself. Obviously, tending to these simple needs of mine is integral to being the wife and mother I try to be!

Such a simple truth, by no means original to my brain, and terribly hard to learn.

Family, Intentionality, Motherhood, Personal Reflection

The Waiting

Carrie Sue Barnes

The scent of warm pear bread – cinnamon and sweetness – hangs in the air of my kitchen. There are dishes to wash and a floor to sweep but they can wait. There is a to-do list beside this computer, its uncrossed items lifting off the page to remind me there is still much to be done. However, much can wait. Even as I assess whether these are real contractions I’m experiencing or simply more Braxton Hicks after a long, tiring day, I am pulled toward quiet thoughts. There simply haven’t been enough of them lately. They are stolen, pushed aside, stepped over, or buried under heaps of mental activity. They wait. They wait for me.

Do yours do likewise? Are the edges of your mind lined with subtle, patient, quiet thoughts? Wallflowers in the spinning ballroom of your head. Do they wait for you to sit out a dance?

Mine wait. Patiently, perseveringly, but not permanently. Eventually, they do go. They slip regretfully out the door like the party guest who will not intrude upon others’ conversations but could’ve been the highlight of the evening if anyone had taken a moment to look them in the eye and invite them into their circle.

During weeks of tiredness, my body longing for sleep by seven p.m yet not finding it until much later and then only intermittently, my brain is aching for energy. I get caught up in despondent reflections of ‘I used to write,’ and ‘I used to teach,’ and so on. Not that they last long. They are overrun by the joy I have at what my life has become. Wife, stepmother, and now mother. I feel my child turn over inside me and I imagine holding him in my arms. How can such regrets withstand it? The negativity is polished away by my blessed reality and what remains is only the root of the regrets. That I do still long to be a writer, a teacher, a thinker! That those should be woven into marriage and motherhood for as many days as I’m given. It’s the figuring out how that is the challenge. Challenge does not equal impossibility though. In fact, a challenge must be possible to achieve or it is merely nonsense and nothing else.

Yes, this is a genuine challenge. One that I will take up each day – sometimes setting it back down after only a moment and a sigh, certainly, but other times engaging it with strength and wit and success. It’s my belief that the engagement must begin with quiet thoughts: the ones waiting on me, eager but calm, ready to pull me deeper into truth, beauty, and holiness. Anything good must begin there.

Holiness, Intentionality

Can’t Get Enough

Carrie Sue Barnes

Two mornings in a row, I have been awakened by Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough” playing on my alarm clock radio. As I lay for a few moments longer on my pillow today, listening to Mr. White’s resonant baritone and laughing at the coincidence, I couldn’t help wondering if there was any significance to it. Was I about to live Monday through again in a Bill Murray-esque manner? Oh, I hoped it wouldn’t be so. Then as I passed the next hour dressing for the day, applying my makeup and drying my hair, I wondered a bit at how anything signifies anything.

Let me qualify that. Of course there are things of obvious significance – events, actions and interactions that have meaning and influence, effecting change and so on. My pre-workday musings had more to do with the rest. The rest. All that fills our days and nights, in between the moments of clear significance. The way we phrase our conversations; the clothes you put on; the food you decide to consume; the music you tune your radio to in the car; the people you choose to smile at; the people you choose not to smile at; the tv show you sit down to watch; the laundry you make time for; the dishes you decide to leave for another day… Does any of it signify?

There are many in this world who would answer with a firm ‘no.’ What do these things matter? In the long run, who cares? Well, sorry to be such a contrarian but I take a different view. I say ‘yes.’ I say the little bits of life signify a great deal. The little bits are what our habits consist of, and our habits are what our characters consist of. Recognizing this, I believe we can choose to live deliberately. That is, live in a manner that directs all our actions, words and even thoughts to the service of developing virtue. Patience, courage, generosity, joy, mercy, understanding, love. Virtue doesn’t grow out of enormous tests and trials. Virtue grows out of day to day living and proves its worth when the larger events come to pass.

I too get caught up in thinking that living with purpose means setting out to achieve great things. I fill myself up with resolve that is sapped in a week’s time. I overlook all the small opportunities to live deliberately and when the opportunities for great things do come, I find I am nowhere near ready for them.

I don’t know if Barry White will wake me up again tomorrow. I do know that choosing to be amused and to get out of bed smiling as the song played set the tone for my day. In fact, this seemingly insignificant event and reaction might be credited with today being remarkably more pleasant than yesterday despite the content of the two days being so alike. Just another reminder to live deliberately and trust that the big and lasting good things are built upon numerous little and momentary good things. Barry White and I encourage you to live so as to infuse significance into all the moments between the significant.

Faith, Hope, Intentionality

Rediscovering

Carrie Sue Barnes

On Saturday, I began reading Matthew Kelly’s Rediscover Catholicism and it has me all fired up in the best way. His message has me recalling my love for this sort of material – spiritually themed, practically applied and authentically communicated. Oh how I love the Church. I neglect that love sometimes, letting it fall to the back of the line of the things that occupy my days. This book is an effective rearranger of that line.

The pages of the first chapters already host plenty of underlined passages and small margin notations. Plenty of statements Kelly makes have struck me as significant with a lot of, ‘that is so true’ moments. The one that’s staying with me since yesterday reads, “God always wants our future to be bigger than our past. Not equal to our past, but bigger, better, brighter, and more significant. God wants your future and my future, and the future of the Church, to be bigger than the past. It is this bigger future that we need to envision” (pp. 23-24).

I’ve been thinking plenty about the future in recent days. Plenty. Sometimes I want to just stop thinking about it for a while and remember to be present in the present. However I can’t claim I’ve thought about the future in such terms as Kelly suggests. What I love about this declaration, that God wants our future to be “bigger, better, brighter, and more significant,” is the beautiful reality that when God wants something, He always, always makes a way for it to be possible. He doesn’t do it for us. He makes it possible. This means that I can have that future. You can have that future. If God desires it, He will provide means necessary for you to attain it. And He does, undoubtedly, desire it.

Intentionality, Love, Midwest

Spurts

Carrie Sue Barnes

Spring seems to be coming only in spurts this year. Tiny, sporadic, brief spurts. Like today – the first day of sunshine and 50+ degrees in a couple weeks. And a couple weeks ago there was only one similar day after another few weeks prior to that. It’s been sad and discouraging and all too well suited to the way I’m living. Writing, cleaning, exercising, praying – all in spurts. It’s shameful and it’s not me!

Consider this a mid-year review. If I were my boss, I would not give me a raise, inflation or no inflation. Time to step up. There is nothing more disappointing in a person than potential left unactualized. And no person more disappointing in that regard than when it is your own self.

Rebounding from a 10 day cold and headaches that rendered me horribly listless, I am ready to not only feel like myself but to live like myself. How I used to prize consistency! Consistent effort bore consistent fruit.

Let’s be honest, falling in love interrupts everything. In the best possible way, of course, but I realize now that I have waited a whole year to adapt to living in love. Welcoming after years of waiting the chance to focus so wholly on my relationship, it is time to live more as my truest self in that relationship. I am a prayerful, tennis playing, hiking, reading and writing friend and family member who is in love. I am not a lover who used to be the rest of those things. It’s as cliche as it comes, I know. Who doesn’t lose themselves in the joy of the new relationship only to find the relationship would be better nurtured if they hadn’t lost track of themselves? So I suppose I’m just learning one of the oldest lessons around. Well, it’s learned. I get it. And I am glad for the chance to have learned it. Now let’s get on with it! 🙂

Intentionality, Simplifying

Taking the Ordinary Time

Carrie Sue Barnes

The walk I took yesterday morning deserves its own blog post. It was that lovely. However, it’s loveliness put me in the right frame of mind for other thoughts and I won’t restrict myself to the walk itself. Over the weekend I visited my brother and his family in western Michigan. Their home is situated on a country road in a hollow surrounded by hundreds of acres of cornfields and century old pines, maples and oaks. The setting is impossibly and inherently nostalgic. Having attended Mass the evening before, I took advantage of the quietness of Sunday morning by sneaking out for a walk before anyone else in the house stirred. It was early enough for the dew to still soak the leaves of every plant in existence but late enough for the sun to be halfway to its full height and heat. The picture above is not one I took on this walk but might well have been. The sunlight poured through trees tall and old enough to pass as Ents and it draped the surface of vast cornfields in yellow splendor. I set my iPod to shuffle through five Matt Maher albums and trekked over the broken concrete of the old roads for an hour.

Upon my return I tried to capture for myself why this walk was so gloriously refreshing. I hadn’t taken a solitary, early morning walk in a few months… maybe I was rediscovering something I’d forgotten I love. The exercise was edifying… but it isn’t as if I’d been motionless in the previous days – hours had been passed in the backyard pool with my nephews and niece. As I wondered over it, my mind drifted to thoughts of the coming week. I searched my brain for what I had scheduled in the days and nights. What would fill my evenings? Anything significant happening at work? Events to attend or people to see? I came up with nothing. Nothing. A possible dinner with friends passing through on Monday evening, but that was only tentative. Relief settled over my skin like a cool sheet on a humid night and I smiled over my discovery.

What was particularly extraordinary about my walk that morning was that it was ordinary. It was an ordinary thing to do – taking a walk – but because I had the time and the energy and the uncluttered mind for it, it had the potential to be extraordinary. Suddenly I could look forward to this week with great delight. Having time to do ordinary things could be counted as extraordinary because of how seldom it is the case. All the things I’ve been thinking I ought to take time to do, in the next weeks I might actually have the time to take for some of them. Time for the taking – now that’s worth a smile and a sigh.