RE-Constitute: Learning a New Approach to Living

My days are filled with an ebullient mix of family, business, consulting, coaching, and the farm. I suffer from dishpan hands, feed my kids every eight minutes, and repeatedly show Mt. Laundry who’s boss. On rainy days I hardly leave my family room with my laptop and whiteboard where the fireplace keeps me toasty (I can’t stand being cold). Conference calls and the blessed mute button drive me to every room of the home, to tamp down the sound of giggles and guns. Baking and sorting the insane amount of photos I take are my brain breaks. I still have not conquered my Nemesis: mastery of Lego parts (stay tuned, system number 3 is in progress). I am a conduit for snacks, lost items, and brilliant ideas. I kiss my family a hundred times before I leave for appointments and drive as little as I can. I drink a lot of tea with folks sitting at my kitchen counter, listening, hugging, teaching, and cheering. I gratefully take the new assignments presented to me. I often work and write late at night to allow for walks and talks during daylight.

Sometimes I get up after everyone is asleep and just walk around the house praising and weeping for the beautiful life I have.

But….going back just about four years ago….I hardly recognize the driven person I used to be. I was exhausting myself trying to attend to all the areas of life.

• I was stressed and always felt “behind.”
• Trying to reach my vision “out there,” I felt dissatisfied with “right now.”
• I was doing things for the right reason, but in a smaller story – my own. I had not yet become a purveyor of heaven’s plans. I was still a merchant of my own making.
• Plus, I had to leave one thing to do another. When I was working, I had to compartmentalize so I wasn’t saddled with mom guilt. When I was at home, I was never fully tuned in because I was thinking about my never-ending to do list. I was living with a divided heart.

I could NOT figure out what was wrong, or how to articulate it, much less the solution for this bind. I was so dichotomized and overwhelmed. (This is why I now LOVE to end overwhelm for others, because you have the authority to release others from that which you personally have overcome!!)

I desperately needed to be REconstituted. To reconstitute is form anew. I – and really our whole family – needed a new structure (reconstitution) to learn our best form of living.

We needed a new approach to life, which is really hard to do when you’re in the middle of it!

Reconstitution involves the reconstruction of separated parts.

The place our life was the most separated was our minds. I had a lot of disparate pieces I was trying to focus on in my mind. Remember the “wheel of life” pie chart? My brain was like that. Each slice represents home, family, fitness, career, etc. The implication is that we should give attention to every area of life and find balance. What a crock. Trying to move between these pie slices of life left me guilty, resentful, and disillusioned. How would I know when I had (for a fleeting moment) achieved balance – that I had somehow achieved the right blend of time allocated to each area? How much should be given to each slice, and who decides? My pie felt like a fragmented spinning plate. I don’t even like pie.

Thankfully, we met a couple who began to teach us about integration, about doing life together as a family in business. We began to perceive that we have a family purpose that we have been sent to actualize, that our kids had a role in that, and that we could take back our life from fragmentation.

Then we began to study the ways of old, and started to realize it didn’t always used to be like this….where people are so separate from one another, running on a hamster wheel, trying to achieve balance between competing obligations. Modern day “advances” in work and life have actually robbed us from the ancient paths of family and work.

Slowly, we began to replace that defeating pie chart of clamoring, competing obligations with a new way of life.

Ironically, that “new” way of life is actually the “old” way of life.

We’ve chosen to integrate our household, business, marriage, parenting, friendships, and the education of our children.

• We’ve decided that one of these areas will not rule the others.
• We returned to the ancient way of the household as the business center with us as stewards.
• We won’t work to live, nor live to work.
• We’ve opted out of the expectations-of-others.
• We now avoid the structures that would bind or programatize us

In so doing, we’ve returned to a simpler – and exponentially more satisfying – way of life.