In this post I mentioned that I’m trying to implement a Rule of Life for myself. It’s an idea originating with Catholic author Holly Pierlot, who incidentally has a blog worth checking out—but it doesn’t replace reading her book.
The book provides an algorithm; by following it and considering your own particular constraints, you design a form of self-discipline that is workable for you, based on the natural rhythms of your day. I found the probing of my time, constraints, and responsibilities was satisfyingly analytical. It was also fun to the process of "tweaking" the resulting Rule, or debugging it you might say, over the course of several weeks, until I found that it required some self-discipline to follow its loose schedule but was still easy enough that I didn’t get discourage. Also, it was nice to build some rewards into the system. I set up my Rule such that if I’m efficient, I am automatically rewarded with extra free time that I get to spend on myself.
The first step: Consider your obligations in each of the roles of your life as a mother. In order of priority, the roles are conveniently organized as the "five p’s:"
- prayer – God, or spirituality, comes first.
- person – Your next obligation is to ensure that you are healthy, nourished, refreshed, and fit enough to fulfill the rest of your roles.
- partner – The primary human relationship in your life is with your spouse, and the nurturing of that relationship takes highest priority.
- parent – The next obligation is towards the care and education of the whole person of each of your children.
- provider – Finally, you have obligations concerning the physical upkeep of the family, which may be work at an outside job to bring in money, or it may be the work necessary to maintain the home.
The priority ranking doesn’t reflect the amount of time spent fulfilling each set of obligations; rather, it’s a reminder of the order in which you should make time for each of them. Make sure that prayer (however you understand it) gets onto your daily calendar before anything else does, even if the time devoted to it is only five minutes a day. Once you’ve made time for prayer, make sure that you do what needs to be done to keep yourself healthy, energetic, and sane, whatever that is. And so on, and so on.
Not long after reading this book, I heard a Sunday homily in which our pastor named these exact five priorities, in the precise order above, and recommended the practice of developing a Rule of Life. It seems unlikely that he read Pierlot’s book—maybe they each got them from the same source!
I will add more about the development of my rule in a later post, in which I’ll discuss the concept of "lowering my standards."
bearing blog 