Dear Girl Who Has Three Lives:
(or more):
I know how you feel.
There's the You who works in the coffee shop or the church office or goes to college or the You who stands in her first semester as a teacher with twenty kids who are calling her "Miss So-and-So" and expecting she'll actually teach them stuff about life. Or, if you're like me, there's the You who spends the majority of the week taking care of, playing with, and teaching two precious little girls whose boundless curiosity and ceaseless energy shows you what your Mom has been doing since the birth of your older brother (times four).
There's the You who comes home tired from that other You and wants peace and quiet and a harmonious family. But there is dinner to be made and chores to keep up with and the harmonious family has gone off-key for an hour or two and life is crazy. This was the first You, and is known so well that it fits like a groove, despite its eccentricities. This You has an amazing family that misses her and she misses them and the disjointedness of lives trying to click back together while spinning in hyper-speed--your days off coinciding with their days away--and it's tough to steal moments of normalcy. But this version of You craves those moments and sometimes wonders what it would be like to return to the time when it was the only You and there was time to hang up your clothes and bother to put the bobby-pins back in their dish and that stack of To-Be-Read books was actually diminishing at a discernable pace.
Then, of course, there's the You of dreams. There's the You who, while steaming that milk, folding those invoices, making those calls, or teaching those math lessons, keeps up a secret life behind the scenes of hopes and dreams and long-term goals. For me, that's my writing. A thousand words typed at an unholy hour because every sensible, conscionable minute of normal-people is taken up by those other two Mes. This You might be pursuing music, art, publication, photography, a business, or something else. This You is usually the one who falls, by default, into disrepair because it is the more quiet You. It is sometimes shy and always willing to bend to reality. Dreams can be pushed off, tabled, quietened. This You isn't really all that perishable and if you close down the Word document for three months, the repercussions aren't what they would be if you stopped showing up to work for the same period of time or shut off communication with those dearest to you.
For each of these Yous, You could justifiably devote a whole life, in theory. But theories bend to achievement and everyone realizes we can't claim seventy-two hours for a day in which to be all three. And yet, Girl, you are trying to be all three. I am trying to be all three. Is it wrong? Is it crazy? Should you give up the dreams or the job or the family?
No.
It's not wrong, it's only a little crazy, and you should definitely not give up your dreams, your family, and the job God has placed you in (unless He shows you otherwise). One life crammed into one's head is enough to make most people overwhelmed. But to those of use who are juggling three, how can we keep sane?
I've been thinking. I am barely home these days between one thing and another and weddings. On any given Saturday, my room is covered with cast off clothing that I was too tired to put away after coming home from a fifteen-hour day. My bobby-pins never make it into the dish. I wear jeans when the weather is eighty-five because I really couldn't spare the extra eight minutes to shave my legs and heaven forbid I get in the shower and find no shampoo because when you're showering at 6:30 a.m., there's no one awake to fetch it for you. So I've been giving more thought than usual to how the Three-Lived-Girl can keep sane and it comes down to Jim Eliot:
"Wherever you are, be all there."When you're at work, be entirely at work. When you're at home, be entirely at home. When you're working on that painting, that story, that song, that product, be one-hundred-percent there in that moment. For me, that means shutting off my 3G data on my phone at work, leaving texts till a more convenient hour when I'm blogging or writing, or lesson-planning, and leaving my phone upstairs when I'm around the house. I love technology and social media has blessed me with a covey of friends I would otherwise have never met. But technology is deceptive in that it convinces you that things have to be done RIGHT NOW. And the girl already living three lives can't afford to have them bleed into one another. If I am trying to teach math concepts to a three year-old and answer a five year old's questions about how Indians killed buffalo and answer a Facebook message about wedding plans and reply to a comment on a blog and to text the recipe I made up for fish tacos to the sister who is making dinner because I can't be home to help because I'm headed an hour into the city to go a bible-study and I'm trying to do it ALL AT ONCE, I will crumble. I don't know about you, but I can feel it crumble. I can feel my resolve weakening, my heart becoming downcast, and my soul overwhelmed. I decided to try Jim Eliot's theory out last week and give myself completely to the tasks at hand one at a time. What I found was a sense of joy in accomplishing that one task instead of angst over the twenty-seven others left to be done. Yes, there were still twenty-seven tasks, but one can meet a single foe on level ground far easier than being dog-piled by an entire company.
Wherever you are, Girl With Three Lives, be all there. In the mornings, give one hundred percent of your attention to Jesus and focus your eyes on Him from the start. At work, give full attention to the joy of building into the lives around you. When you're home, leave the virtual world connected to a charger and play a game of Scrabble or watch an old Disney film together. When you're pursuing dreams, friends, or long-cherished goals, give it your all.
That's how we keep all the balls in the air. Focus.
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