A beautiful spring morning, toasty 80s in Southern California, and my client sat in one of her garden patio chairs and sipped coffee. Gone were the weeks of clouds and rain, and the flowers and plants in the garden had sucked it all up. One sunny day and it seemed everything was going to grow like crazy.
Well, the chairs were grimy. Weeds were sprouting up. Twigs and leaves were scattered like pick-up-sticks.
About two hours later, the weeds were gone and scrub-brush in hand, the patio chairs sparkled. Her coffee was cold, and my client she called me for a massage. Too much bending, scrubbing and pulling had her looking for me.
When she called I was home, tending to my little patio, pulling up stray ice plants.
No we hadn’t had any water, just coffee. No warm-up, just the urge to tidy. I had stooped for a few weeds and swept the patio. She had done the entire white tornado.
"I can’t just sit there ands sip coffee,” she said. “I’ve never been that way. I see something that needs doing and I get to it. I’m such a Type A. I need to be more of a B-minus.”
It’s tough being the organized organizer, the COO of OCD, the one who flits about picking up empty cups and dirty napkins while others chat. The calm spring garden is a joy, and like many people my client and I were running down a list of things that must be done or else.
“I was doing the same thing when you called,” I said, “But I have learned the hard way. I had two cubic feet of garden soil to open and spread, I should move the fountain, the garden stones and rake, and I should feed all the plants that survived the winter. Lots of shoulda-shouldas, and I decided to whack some stray plants and sweep instead. Just a small chunk of what I think it needed and I called it a day.”
It is hard to pick a smaller patch, a shorter list, or to ignore most of what “needs” doing, but it seems if no one does it, the earth continues to wobble on its journey through space. Picking a chunk of a project, instead of going for it all, is a way to manage the “A” inside you without going a bit bonkers. I like to think of it as giving it the old “68.7 percent” – a barely passing grade with no gold key at the end.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” she said. “But I think it is well worth a try.”
And your massage therapist - and your illicostalli, upper traps, scalenes, solei and longissimi will thank you for it.
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