January 3, 2007

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  finally i have a break... i worked up until the last second on that silly research paper.  i was supposed to have gone home on 12/21, so that i would be home for my birthday, but noooooo.  i was still stuck in 1916/1919 and didn't finish until 1:00PM on my birthday... then i had to take out the garbage, do the recycling, pack my clothes, etc... so i didn't get home until late afternoon.  but at least i got home.  i wonder if anyone else notices that when you get home after being away for a while, everyone seems to want to suck up all of your free time?  between the family dramas and limited visiting of friends and working at church for Christmas, and then getting sick (quelle surprise, not), i actually needed to come back into the city for my break.
  
  this is the first year that i didn't put up the Christmas tree > dj did that.  when i got home, he had it all assembled and with lights on it.  it looked very pretty, but i felt very odd about it.  that's always been my thing, to decorate it from the very bare bones, and there is a certain rhyme and reason to the way i do things.  this year it wasn't that way.  yes, i know that it was only the lights that i didn't get to do, but even the ornaments were different, although i put them on the tree.  i couldn't put on the most traditional of them because those have their own boxes to protect them, since they are over 50 years old, and some of them are getting close to 100 years old... so what went on the tree were ornaments that don't need special boxes, although they are still special.  some of them are from when my dad was a boy, but they are plain bulbs... there are 2 or 3 that are 90 years old, however, and are interesting to look at as well...  but i won't be home to take the tree down, so that falls to dj as well.
  
  it's hard to let go.  it's hard to let others do what i have always done, and have always done a certain way.  and yet, what choice do i, or any of us, have?  if we insist on it being done the way it's 'always' been done, then we run the risk of it never being done again at all...  it's a lesson we need to learn for all parts of our lives > the workplace, group projects, even raising our children.  even if we feel we can do a better job, we need to learn to empower other people to do things... i think that sharing that personal power we've accumulated might be one of the hardest things to learn to do.  i watch both my mother and my mother-in-law struggle with that, with learning to let go of things they can no longer do and entrust them to us, even if we won't do them precisely the way that they would like them done.  i need to practice doing that now, since not only will i eventually become old and perhaps infirm, but more immediately, as my role changes and i become a priest, there will be many things in my family life that will have to be done by others or else not be done at all...

  • 10:28 am
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