See my cliffhanger post for background.
How can I use what I’ve learned about gluttony* and apply it to the other besetting imperfections in my life?
I’ve been turning the problem over in my mind especially as I lie in bed at night, waiting to fall asleep. And a few days ago, just as I was drowsing off, pondering, I had a small thought that seemed promising and then as I tried fitting its connections into the various slots in my problem I found that it seemed to work.
I got up, somewhat astonished, and went downstairs for a glass of water, and in a bleary moment of worry that I would have forgotten my little thought in the morning, I scrawled one word on a sticky note and left it where I knew I would see it in the morning.
Once, when I was heavy, the fundamental problem was that I was inordinately attached to food, and suffered from a fear of going without “enough” of it. I had to learn how to practice detachment from food so that hunger — the state of waiting for food — would not make me anxious.
Well, the analogy comes from the fact that my current fundamental problem is also one of attachment. I am inordinately attached to time. I keep trying to call it “mine.” My time. I own it. I should be able to make it do what I want. I reach ahead into the minutes, hours, and days, and assign an expectation to each slot. Because each day I get 24 hours that I think should belong to me by rights.
And of course, that’s simply not true.
I need to practice detachment from time, the way I once needed to practice detachment from food.
Because attachment to “my” time underlies all the problems I’ve written about, the difficulty with prayer, the distancing myself from my children’s problems, the irritation with being interrupted, the anxiety about changing plans. Just as I once feared hunger, I also fear running out of time, not having enough time. I used to hoard food; I still jealously guard my time, always trying to do something extra to save it for later, spending it with difficulty.
“Mom, can I paint?”
“No. It takes too much time to clean up.”
“Mom, can you read me a story?”
“No. I am getting ready for dinner right now.”
“Mom, can you play a game with me?”
“No. It’s my break time.”
* * *
How can I take what I’ve learned about detachment from food and apply it to detachment from time? Well, there are a number of similarities here.
(1) Both are “things of this world” that will pass away. As hard as it may be to imagine eternity without, say, hot fresh pizza, the fact is that there are a finite number of pizza slices I can and will eat before I kick the bucket. It’s hard to imagine eternity without time in which to do stuff, too. And yet, though I like pizza and I like to keep busy, I’m supposed to enjoy this afterlife thing? I suppose one possible response is to try to eat as much pizza and get as much stuff done as I can, here on earth, but it’s plain that another response is to learn to let go of both.
(2) It is impossible to go cold turkey from time or planning. Just as the person with food attachment issues may not solve them by declining to eat food ever again, the person with time-attachment issues may not solve them by declining to allocate time. Everyone has to eat something; and everyone has to spend time doing something. So it is not an issue of “quitting” so much as it is an issue of learning to live peacefully alongside and in the stuff.
Blessed are the efficient, for they shall get all their paperwork in on time, and that shall give them a chance to catch up on the laundry. Hm, doesn’t quite have a ring to it.
(3) Both are fundamental and fear-based imperfections that feed a set of destructive habits. In the case of gluttony, fear of hunger led me to habitually eat too much at meals, to eat snacks I didn’t need, to hoard food, and generally to think too much about food all the time. In the case of attachment to “my” time, fear of running out of time leads me to spend what ought to be my leisure time and my family time working or planning. It leads me to refuse to respond to children who interrupt me at my work, because I’ve already decided what to do with that block of time. Just as I used to like the sensation of eating too much, I recognize that I derive pleasure from working or planning. Both allayed fear.
(4) Here is why I alluded to mom-blog angst in the previous post. I don’t know for sure what drives anyone else to find faults with themselves. But I do know something about ME that might apply to others too. Just as the invisible fear of not having enough food was the root cause of many bad habits, this fear of not having enough time, underlies a host of seemingly different visible faults. Instead of attacking everything at once, then, it should be possible to make progress on every visible related imperfection by working slowly and steadily on that root of fear and attachment.
(5) Previously, I tried to deal with the visible problem in ways that actually worsened the underlying cause. When I dieted to lose weight, I became MORE obsessed with food, and especially with “getting enough nutrition” and “getting enough to feel satisfied.” When I have wrangled with time in the past, I have tried to do it through ever-more-finely-divided scheduling: Not enough time with the kids? Put them in another block on the schedule! Some scheduling is necessary, obviously, just as nutrition is necessary for the dieter, but a schedule is not going to solve the problem of undue attachment to control over my time. If anything it feeds the notion that I CAN control and own time that “belongs” to me.
(6) In both cases, it was disgust with the behaviors themselves, with the bad habits, that awoke me to the need for change. I didn’t really detach from gluttony because I wanted to lose weight. I did it because I was tired of eating so much. Well, I am also tired of saying NO, I’M BUSY to everybody so much. I want to stop now, please, even if it will be hard and will require me to fight temptation.
* * *
So how will I do it?
Well… How did I detach myself from food?
I worked at the level of the habits, changing behavior first. I hoped that I could teach myself that I didn’t have to fear hunger. But I knew that even if I never stopped fearing, I still had some control over my behaviors and my habits, so I started there.
I did experiments on myself to see what worked.
I talked and wrote about my new habits, a lot. I described the successes and I described what I learned from the setbacks. I kept it front and center in my attention.
I read books: how-to books and memoirs. Sometimes I gleaned tips and tricks, but mostly it was a way of keeping my attention on what I was trying to change.
Knowing I had the rest of my life to practice new habits, I didn’t hurry. I worked on just a few habits at a time, not everything at once, and I took very small steps.
* * *
I don’t know for sure if this will “work.” When I was learning how not to be a glutton, I didn’t write openly about it until my weight started to come off. I wasn’t willing to take the risk of being proven a coward and a quitter.
It’s a little different now. I have some hope, based on my previous experience.
So. Habit number one.
Starting right now, unless I’m driving, I will look at my children when I talk to them and when they talk to me.
That’s it. That’s my first baby step.
Here we go.
St Francis de Sales, pray for us.
*[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
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