Difficult

I am having a difficult time preparing for all that looms over me these days.  Selling a house and packing to move are two of my least favorite activities in life.  I think I'd prefer giving birth.  For one thing, giving birth never required me to make any decisions.  For another thing, people come around and help you when you give birth.  Although, I have to say, many people have been extremely kind in offering to come help me pack.  It's the winnowing before the packing that--literally--triggers my gag reflex.  Wrapping things in packing paper and tucking them into boxes is the fun part, if you can get to that point.

Anxiety, paralysis and diarrhea are my three most salient symptoms these days.

I find myself out in the yard, weeding my flowers, watering, deadheading, mixing up sprinkling cans full of Miracle Grow solution.

Because who would want to be working with this stuff--

(note that many of these boxes have never 

been unpacked from the previous move, 

or even moves previous to that one)

 if she could be outside with these beauties?

It's bittersweet to putter in the garden these days, knowing I won't be around to see it next spring.  My sweet woodruff is thriving, but I never got to see it bloom.  I wonder if sweet woodruff grows in North Carolina?

I try to use this question, as I struggle to make decisions:  "How sad would I be if this were lost in a fire?"  I try to think of these days as a nice, long opportunity to go around and salvage what is most important to me.

Then I find a big stack of Bernstein Bears books in a box, and picture myself reading them to grandchildren, and I get all confused.  Sometimes I feel injured, that I am being forced to give up my family's past, and I wonder why.  Why me?  But I know that when I start asking that question, I'm delving into self-pity and I need to stop.

Yesterday I found some old journals.  I sat down and read through one.  It was from 2002.  Some of the things I've written in the past make me cringe.  Others reassure me that God has always been with me and will continue to help me.  I guess I should be encouraged that I have grown over the years to where I can clearly see problems with my past thinking and assumptions.  Should I burn everything I am now ashamed of?  Or is it an important part of my journey?  What about the parts where I wrote about things that I have since learned on excruciatingly deeper levels?  It's the oddest sensation, to read something I wrote down in 2002, and realize that I relearned it last year, and thought it was a new lesson.

I don't really have time to blog.  I just want to end by alluding to Myers-Briggs personality theory and saying that I wish I had an SJ around to help me, a Samwise Gamgee.  All of us absent-minded, dreamy, distractible, indecisive, intuitives (N people) need capable, practical SJs to cheer us along.  Sometimes we resent being bossed by them (hence, I married a fellow NP), but in times when we have an overwhelming job to accomplish, we desperately need them.

Strengthen the weak hands,

and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who have an anxious heart,

"Be strong!  Fear not!

Behold, your God will come with vengeance,

with the recompense of God.  

He will come and save you."

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

~Isaiah 35:3-5