A good friend with years in recovery for alcohol and addiction used to tell me, “f ya gotta gotta say it or ya gotta gotta do it, you probably shouldn’t do either”.  Her advice really helped me in many a situation when I was just bursting to react in some inappropriate way because  if I didn’t say or do that thing that I thought I had to say or do life would end as I knew it.  Over the years, I’ve learned to “process” my feelings, thoughts, and reactions with therapists, friends and family. Meditation has also helped me to learn how to “pause when agitated” until I could respond to a situation instead of have a hair trigger reaction.   What I’ve put together over the years is that when I can come from a calm place that doesn’t have that cold hard edge of obsession to it, then I can give myself a beat or two in order to make a conscious choice with my words and actions.  Skills that I just assumed that everyone else in this world naturally had, except me!  Turns out, some of us do have them  but then  a whole lot of us don’t and that’s okay as long as we are willing to learn what we need to learn.

It’s so weird how I used to try to deal with my obsessive nature.  On the one hand, I would clean my house til it shown to perfection.  That was with dogs and cats living inside with me too!  Everything was chillingly sparkling and clean but if you happened to look in my closet or in my drawers they’d probably be crammed full of stuff all in disarray.  Says a whole lot about how I was in the world—trying to look good on the outside like a duck on top of the water all the while peddling as fast as I could underneath.  Today, my house is clean but I bet there’s a cobweb or two that I may have missed.  My drawers are pretty neat and so is my closet. In fact, I try not to have anything in them that I don’t love and use regularly.  I’ve learned to let go of the obsession of perfection about things such as having all my books in my home office in some kind of order by title or author name.  Instead, I have them in places by subject and I know about where a book is depending on what it is about.  If I ever find myself obsessing over my filing or what I have in my step file on top of my desk, I know that is a sign that I’m avoiding something that I’d rather not take a closer look at and instead worry about the piping on the material of the furniture on the Titanic so to speak.

My Dad is fond of saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff” and I know that is a hard earned saying for him because we are so much more alike than I ever figured.  I know I got a lot of my tendencies for perfection from him but I also got the ability to let go, ride and glide through life as well.  There’s a happy balance in there somewhere and life is just so much easier to live when we’re able to back away from what we’re obsessing on.

How about you? What can you back away from today?