Episode One: Changing Your Mind

  Hunter is a magnet for messiness. Actually, that's not true, messy doesn't find Hunter, Hunter creates messes. I can literally go from room to room cleaning up after only him.  And there's six of us in my house (me, my spouse, and our three other children).  Hunter is totally incompatible with tidy and this quality is frustrating, time-consuming and frankly pisses me off.  After three years, if I had no other outlet, I would probably be incredibly bitchy.  Footprints in the sand however, have inspired me to change my mind.

  The other day, I was coming back upstairs after making a spontaneous decision to fold laundry downstairs while three-year-old Hunter was upstairs.  I discovered his shorts on the landing and set the basket down wondering if this meant he'd had an accident.  As I rose with the surprisingly dry shorts in my hand, my eyes were drawn to the kitchen where a cloud of unknown particles hung in the air.  With my mouth slightly agape, my mind tried to find reason from the visual.  Aha - iced tea container on the counter... F.  I was still slightly in awe as I walked up the stairs and as I got closer to the mound on my recently washed floor I noticed something; footprints.  They looked like footprints in sand. There's something magical about footprints in the sand so why should footprints in iced tea mix be any different? Sure, I had to clean it up and the dust clogged the motor in the vaccuum and it stopped working for a bit, but this was the beginning of changing my mind.  Footprints in the sand have a way of stimulating your imagination.

If I had decided to make a goal of changing my mind, it would probably have stagnated there with "clean out closet".  Goal setting is important; I've done it, I've acheived some, but I liken this process to writing to-do lists and I do not find it empowering in the least.  In fact I find it kind of depressing.  Goal setting is supposed to be a map to making your dreams come true.  That seems nice (and idealistic).  To-do lists, or at least my to-do lists, consist of things I would rather not be doing and are therefore not goals and certainly not dreams. I imagine there is a connection between them though.

For example, if I have a list of things I need to accomplish in a given day, and I accomplish them, then I can do something else (achieve dreams). But what if my to-do list is complicated?  I mean, how am I supposed to reach my dreams by doing laundry?  Or washing walls? Well, says logical inner voice, if I complete these things today, I won't have to do them tomorrow.  Baha.  There will still be laundry and if Hunter gets his hands on another marker walls will need to be washed.  Or... I could just stop - wall washing, not laundry.

Hunter has been drawing on his wall at various times over the past eight months.  Washing it was the first consideration and it was a to-do item that didn't get done (and made me feel like a procrastinator).  Then I noticed that he had managed to find another writing utensil (and another and another) and was slowly adding to what I now consider to be his mural.  Perhaps I am encouraging a future vandal, or maybe an artist.  Time will tell.  The point is, I have since decided that I am not going to bother scrubbing his wall because a blank canvas can be utter torment to an artist - and I do not want to torment my child, who is a budding potential artist for the sake of my decision.

Changing your mind is not an easy thing.  There are voices in there.  One of my inner voices belong to my grandmother.  Nana's voice keeps telling me to wash Hunter's wall.  But I have decided to give authoritative power to this new voice that is so much cooler.  This voice is much more relaxed and says "you're not procrastinating if you never intended to do it in the first place...".  I love Nana but she's kind of anal about things like clean walls.  I agree, for my space and that space I entertain friends in, but I don't have to look at Hunter's walls much and I think he likes his scribbly art.  Maybe it feels more like his own space.  Can't blame him for that.

Some day I might decide to wash the wall but I will ask him what he wants to do first.  Perhaps he will decide that he won't draw on the rest of the walls because he can just do it on his.  Again, time will tell.  This is new; an observation of human behaviour.  I'm not procrastinating, I'm just revising my to-do list.