The Task

      What if the solution, like the goal, is more of the problem than its name suggests.  Solutions and goals aren’t typically the end all to be all.  They are completed tasks.  It’s a checked box.  The box has been checked.  Why doesn’t this “task” feel completed?

     Was it your task to complete?  Who put the solutions and goals into the box in the first place?  For the majority of our early lives we are simply clicking off goals and tasks that have been set up by someone else.  It’s all chores and homework with a few seconds carved out to fill in the spaces between.

     The busy work keeps you from “getting into too much trouble” and running the train off the tracks.  It was school, homework, some intermediate activity (band, basketball, volleyball, swimming, baseball, softball, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling, theater, choir, chorus, glee club), work, college prep, dating, rejection, church, temple, or mosque.

     Heaven help us if we were saddled with sick, depressed, alcoholic, abusive, or absent parents.  If you were lucky enough to be outside of this super intense cycle, you weren’t able to sidestep all of it.  You had a friend or cousin who had to crash on your couch, sleep in the guest bed room, or seemed to spend more time with your family than they did with their own.

     There were the raised voices behind closed doors, arguments held over the phone, the “maybe this isn’t really our business” conversation.  “Please, you can’t let them go back.  He’ll kill them.  Just let them stay until he sleeps it off” response.

     So many intense kitchen conversations were over heard from a vent in the bedroom.  We were quietly listening to our parents talking other parents off the ledge.  They were younger parents who were supposed to have everything but couldn’t understand why it was all going sideways.  They came to my parents because they were older.  In hindsight they were younger than I am now.

     Maybe you were on the other end of the phone hoping you could crash on a friend’s couch, sleep in their guest bedroom, or spend more time with their family than your own.  Maybe you were too young to remember the last time you left your house but you somehow, even though you were crying and wanting to stay, knew you weren’t going back.

     Whose boxes are these?  Who would choose any of these boxes to check?  What if the busy work were finding out about who we were deep inside and moving in that direction rather than distracting us from the unknown?  

     When we were little, my Dad didn’t just send us to bed.  Our bedtime was 8:00 pm.  At 7:30 we would do 5 minutes of calisthenics and then we would ‘sit and listen to the house’.  We would close our eyes and try to listen for the sounds of the house.  Because we couldn’t hear the house, he would have us listen to our breathing.  He would then have us pay attention to our heart beat.  Our feet would be planted on the floor and we were allowed to leave the day behind.

     When we opened our eyes we had carved out a few seconds in the day to keep the train running on the tracks.  This is a box I choose to check.  Feet planted, shoulders dropped, door wide open.  Task chosen.  Task completed.