"Full Barrel"
A great many Americans are interested in dieting off and on. I was reading Erma Bombeck where she said, “I’ve been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.”
Some things, it seems, are just not destined to be.
Perhaps, in travels through backwoods country, some of you have come across Mother Goose in the Ozarks by Ray Wood and lamented with him:
Chew my terbacker
And spit my juice:
Want to go to heaven
But it ain’t no use!
Think of all the things you want to do or believe you are going to do or going to get around to doing but you really are not.
I have always called the place we put those things THE GONNA BARREL and have talked about it sometimes. I’m gonna do this or that really now. But I’m not gonna, actually.
Some people who are constitutionally late arriving at anything and everything put punctuality into their Gonna Barrels. “I’ll be there on time,” they say.
No way! Late people make an art of being late, and those same late people seem so much more pleased or laid back or jollier than the people who have to wait for them. You ever notice that? Some people are never going to be on time – let’s face it. And they seem to marry people, when they marry, who are compulsively early. That’s the way it works. The punctual one, then, is tempted to become a liar in the bargain … telling the partner, “We have to be there at half past seven, when the deadline is, in truth, eight o’clock. It’s a game called “How to fool you into being on time – or – how to foil the fooler.”
Both of them have full Gonna Barrels; one full of promises to be on time, the other with promises to relax, be more casual, and to stop lying.
Today I wish to talk about the full barrel which gets filled up with gonnas of all kinds but also with gottas and wannas. First, the Gonna Barrel:
Imagine the litany. You have heard people say, “I’m gonna stop smoking. I’m gonna eat less.” Or “You bet your boots, I’m gonna exercise every day.” Or “I’m gonna be less forgetful.” Or “I’m gonna get organized.” Or even, “I’m gonna be less compulsive about being organized!”
Make your own list! Here, let me begin one that may or may not apply to you or to me. Things in a Gonna Barrel:
*I’m gonna stop complaining and start doing. What I complain about in others is their problem. I’m gonna stop letting my chain get jerked by other people’s emotions. I’m gonna stop arguing and start talking sensibly. I gonna stop yelling at the kids, too, and spend more time with them.
And I’ll guarantee you I am gonna stop evading responsibility and escaping from opportunity and challenge and take charge of my life!
At the same time, I intend to cut out taking on more than I can do (or follow through on) by learning to say NO! N-O. No. No-no-no.
But I’m gonna say, ‘“Yes,’” to the right things.”
Now, just you wait and see. I’m through smiling when I feel like gnashing my teeth, and today marks “the end” of faking nonchalance when I feel “soaked with joy!”
Incidentally, while I am about it, I’m gonna write that letter to Uncle Pleasant; another to Grandmother and especially the one to Claude Hoofnagel (I have owed him a letter for eight months now!).
Don’t be cynical. I am going to get over being “shy” and start accepting compliments gracefully (if I get any), or I am going to stop fishing for compliments which, when I get them, I deny and deflect with false modesty anyway.
Furthermore, I am gonna stop listening to gossip now, really! It ticks me off! Gossip does. I know that if she talks disparagingly about someone and that other one, then she does the same thing about me behind my back! I know if he is given to sidling up to me with a juicy tidbit about this one in the next town (or that one in the next state). He is sidling up to one of them with malice in mind toward me!
So I’m not gonna listen to it. And I am not going to gossip myself. Instead I’m gonna do something about the idiosyncrasies that give others their idiosyncratic pleasure in talking about me!*
Now the Gonna Barrel is beginning to get full, you realize.
*Holy crepes! I am going to stop feeling everybody has to like me (or is it that I am going to learn to be more likable), or, if they are not cordial, that is their problem! So, they can lump it and I can like that!
Oh! I’m going to do some important things – achieving things, to be sure. But, achieving things “inside” where I live, like using my angers constructively (“creatively” for a change). Instead of stacking them in there like little houses of playing cards, awaiting their collapse into depression!
Still, I intend to control my tongue when it begins to wag irrepressibly or irresponsibly.
I do remember the line in the Bible: “Why note the splinter in another’s eye and fail to see the plank in there next to your own eyeball!”
I’m gonna put all of these things in the Gonna Barrel. And I’m gonna do them!*
And, now sitting tight on the lid of the barrel, what is the truth?
I ain’t gonna!
Chew my terbacker.
Spit my juice!
Want to go to heaven
But it ain’t no use!
The Spanish have a proverb for it: “By the street of by-and-by one reaches the House of Never!”
Chances are, most people are not going to do much about what’s in their Gonna Barrels. It seems kinda natural to remove the lid to put some more things in than it does to take things out.
For the most part, that may not be so serious. It is amazing how we can work “around” our Gonna Barrel, “forget it’s there.” I have stacks of books at home (I mean stacks and stacks), sitting in and on my barrel, and I have promised to move that barrel into the basement, the attic, the church, for years now, but I haven’t done it. I do move books all right, always taking one out of the barrel, always reading … but the stacks and my barrel go on sitting right where they were forever!
And sometimes it even seems to be true that if we let problems or worries (or books) sit long enough, they may solve themselves, i.e. may no longer be relevant!
I had a colleague who lived by that dictum. He was a cloud into whom problems and conflicts sank, never to appear again. He believed. “If you forget it, leave it alone; do not do anything about it; 95% of the time, the problem will go away, solve itself.” Maybe so. It worked for him. Never seemed to work that way for me.
Still, it appears that most of us live with our faults without crippling ourselves too much. A warning, though! Leave “all” that stuff in your Gonna Barrel and some of it is going to begin to rot, right in there!
Some things have to be brought out of the Gonna Barrel and put into the Gotta Barrel and acted upon. Done!
What’s in the Gotta Barrel then? Why, the stuff we gotta do, of course.
Some of what is in there is too obvious to dwell upon. Make a living, pay the taxes and such.
If there are children in the home, somebody (or bodies) have to create a home. Home-creating takes commitment and action!
Gotta be done, sometimes one – or two – or more – do “the homework.” The other one or two or more, do outside the home work. Or people do these things in phases, and of course it helps if you like and fit your role (doing what you gotta do at any particular period in your life).
The good life starts when you stop thinking you haven’t got it!
As you go along, responsibilities increase, and you and I have to be reliable if others are going to depend upon us. If not, they, and the society, will pass us by.
Necessity is not only the Mother of Invention; she is the invention of Mother Nature!
And Mother Nature says to each of us: “You gotta learn to survive. Oh, there are times when someone else picks up our burden and carries it for you. It happens when you are sick, or down or defeated and in need of help, perhaps.
If we have never had that happen to us, we have not yet learned as much about life as we ought to know.
But we do not want to be helpless. There is no joy in that!
There are times when a friend or co-worker will bail us out (haul our barrels and empty them), but, most of the time, living in the real world, the Gotta Barrel is there waiting for you, and the only way to face it is to face it.
Pick out one thing at a time and work away at it.
Do the best we can!
This does not mean be perfect ,the way things are supposed to be in heaven. They are not there either, I’ll wager (whatever heaven is or where)!
Remember the story of how the woman or the man ... I think it was a woman in the story I heard … worked herself to death trying to scrub and keep a spotless great cathedral?
The priest said, at her funeral, that her sin was not in trying to keep the cathedral clean but in believing it could be done!
Not even priests and priestesses, not even bishops and bishopesses are perfect. I have a collection of Jesuit stories (by Anthony de Mello) in which a guide was gossiping to a fisherman, telling him anecdotes about the bishop whose guide he had been the previous summer.
“Yes,” said the guide, “he’s a good man, except for his language.”
“Are you saying the bishop swears?” asked the man.
“Oh, but of course, sir, he does.” said the guide, “once he caught a fine salmon. Just as he was about to land it the fish slipped off the hook. So I said to the bishop, ‘that’s damned bad luck!’’
And the bishop looks me straight in the eye, and he says, “Yes, it is indeed!” But that’s the only time I heard the bishop use such language.
A perfectionist is the bane of the existence of those around her, the curse of the life of those around him.
What do we have to do in this life? That is, what does our culture mold us to do? Is it different for men and women (not what we can do but what is expected of us)? What have we gotta do? What goes into the Gotta Barrel? An interesting question (in that regard) has been raised again in the news lately. A number of Wellesley College seniors felt they were doing what they had to do in opposing Barbara Bush’s appearance as this year’s speaker at their graduation ceremonies on June 1st. This does raise some interesting questions. What do women (or men) have to do to achieve full personhood? That is the underlying question behind the quandary presented. Mrs. Bush, to many, represents not only the symbolic position “First Lady of the Land,” but also motherhood, grandparenthood, supporter of spouse, behind the scenes nurturer of a political figure, and considerable achiever too: supporting causes in which she believes.
She also earns “feminist” points for not dying her hair or dressing particularly stylishly, for not losing a lot of weight (or getting a facelift, for that matter). She is “who she is,” unashamedly. Hurrah, for her!
At the same time, however, I do not believe Susana Cardenas and Peggy Reid (co-authors of the student petition questioning the choice of Mrs. Bush as a speaker) were not questioning “wifehood” or “motherhood” or the value of a nurturing role. Nor were they opposed to Mrs. Bush personally.
This has been a media massage and much misinterpretation.
The young women were questioning derived status as opposed to individual (paid or unpaid) achievement.
Mrs. Bush is no slouch. And her invitation to Raisa Gorbachyova to speak with her on June 1st is a stroke of genius.
But Barbara Bush was selected because she is married to George Bush (for no other reason), not because she is a fine mother and a great achiever in her own right.
The consciousness-raising has been good for the country. It makes us look at female and male issues again.
The point in contention, however, is not motherhood or wifehood. The senior class’s short list of possible invitees included mostly mothers: women like writer Alice Walker, who was asked first, accepted, then backed out, and the other achievers who are mothers also like Sally Ride, Toni Morrison, and Sandra Day O’Connor.
Before we take the press too seriously (and, thus, wrongly) on this one, however … I have now read 15 articles or columns or letter on this matter ... and before we judge those dissenting seniors at Wellesley harshly, let us ask (as my wife asked):
Would Princeton or Yale invite the husband of Sandra Day O’Connor to be their commencement speaker?
Good point.
And a similar point was the only point at Wellesley!
Those young women did what they felt they had to do (their gottas), and they were misunderstood. It happens!
What do we have to do, any of us? We do best if we decide to be and represent ourselves as the person we truly are!
Kierkegaard had it, I think, when he said, “Despair – DESPAIR means not being oneself!” Do not be irresponsible, BUT BE YOU!
The way to move (which determines what we put into our Gotta Barrels) is with such honor and integrity as we are able to be aware ... the way to move is toward choosing oneself!
And this is not narcissism. This is authentic.
The closer we get to living “the freedom of authenticity” the more authentic we become – the freer we are. Just be authentic (which is easier), and the more attention we will begin to pay to yet another barrel – the WANT TO Barrel – the “Wanna Barrel!”
The best things in the Wanna Barrel come out of the core of our exuberance, spontaneous assertions of feeling, and behaviors that strengthen self-esteem.
I don’t mean that everything in the barrel of things we want to do will be happy or full of love. We cannot “like” everybody, and we have defenses that will not let all people get too close to us either.
Some people will even convince themselves that what they hate is what they like.
Fran Liebowitz wrote once that she could not understand all the interest there is in “groups” and group phenomena.
The things she liked best were solitary pursuits. “One other,” she said, “was smoking and the other was plotting revenge.” My God, what things to want!
What do women really want? Freud asked that. He did not know.
What do men really want? We don’t know either. Why don’t we all start small?
Instead of huge overarching wants like “I want to know the secrets of the whole universe. I want to know an answer to the age-old theological problem of evil. I want to know what God is precisely what God is and I want to know it now!," just answer, like a great many people answer, these big questions to your own satisfaction with next to no evidence. Strange! Better to start simple.
What do I want for 15 minutes or an hour each day – not a gonna, not a gotta, but a wanna! What do I want to do once each week to replenish myself?
We have to put into our calendars some of the things we do for joy and renewal and service, or, in time, we will find ourselves despairing, and we will never quite get to be our better selves.
Ok, then you put all your gonnas and the gottas and some wannas in a big barrel, and you have too darn much stuff in there! What then?
You may as well take the gonnas out and toss them into the trash basket. You aren’t going to do them anyway.
And the gottas – look at them carefully again from time-to-time, asking, “Is this trip really necessary?”
Then, start paying more attention to some of the wannas. That would be good for you – and for those you love – and possible to do – IF – you would!
It is past time (isn’t it?) to put off saying what we mean, knowing what we will do, and making a beginning.
You have your own confidence … trust it!
You have your own excellence … be it!
You have your own reverence … know it!
You draw from all you love;
Now give some of it back.
Amen.
jake wrote
Here's a pretty fun take on managing the barrels: David Allen on Getting Things Done.
Posted on Wed, May 07, 2008