December 2007 Newsletter
Online Issue # 17
In this Issue:
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April.
The Front Page
Shifting the Pattern
“...without stillness, without being present, we will get it wrong. We will miss the simple quiet opportunities for shifting the pattern.”
-Wayne Muller
Of all the completed projects I’m celebrating this year, my front porch project leaps to the top of every list I imagine myself making. This project spent years on every to-do list and in my nagging awareness, needing attention, begging for attention. The ugly water-stained ceiling tiles bothered me the most, lurking overhead every time I entered the space or even thought about it. The 3-season porch was a do-it-yourself project that really needed to be worked on sometime between April and October, since it has no heat, but not on stifling hot summer days, since it has no air conditioning. In all honesty, it was the last thing I ever felt like tackling on a lovely day in April through October.
I think the primary reason this project took so long to begin is that we were focusing on the wrong energy -- the energy of ugly; so for years we got more ugly. We were also focusing on, and dreading, the chaos, mess and unimagined difficulties that many past projects have produced. We were acting as though the pattern of the past would also be our future, which turned out not to be the case.
Right now, I can’t honestly remember what nudged us out of our resistance and inertia; it may simply have been that the boards we looked at for the new ceiling went on sale at Menards. Then, by the time we had hand selected all 42 of them, hauled them home, and unloaded them, the project was started.
I also used this project as an experiment to work on and talked about it with one of my groups last spring. My public declaration of desire for a pleasant front porch getaway unexpectedly morphed with the idea of a north woods cabin escape. A conversation about old houses, and an upstairs sleeping porch dubbed The Cabin, opened my imagination to the possibility that our porch could be the place we want to escape to for coffee in the early morning, to relax after work, or to spend lazy hours on the weekend—all without having to leave home.
As soon as we had cut and nailed up the first few pine-scented boards our view of the porch shifted from ugly to lovely. Our new perspective energized and motivated us. We wanted to get the next few boards installed, and then the next and the next and finally the last one. At this point we took a break and went on vacation. Once we returned we primed and painted the ceiling and celebrated the completion of what we now called phase 1.
As many of you might expect this is when the project expanded. I realized that we had accumulated enough short pieces of board to cover the walls beneath all the windows, which proved to be a great idea. However, there were a couple of problems to be figured out due to the slope of the original porch floor. But solve them we did. From there we moved to repairing, priming, and painting the wall that was the original exterior front of the house, back in the days before the porch was enclosed. The last big push was priming and painting the floor, first one half and then the other.
Fortunately for me, we continued to use the porch each step of the way. We frequently marveled at how wonderful it was feeling and becoming, not how wonderful it would be when it was finished, but how wonderful it was right now. One day I realized that some new homes are built and moved into in the time we had been working on our porch, and we still had more to do.
The thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the unexpected joy we experienced in doing this project. I reconnected with my carpentry skills which hadn’t been used since I took shop in seventh grade. As a couple married for over 20 years, we enjoyed our process of arriving at mutual solutions to the dilemmas we encountered working on an old house.
This became an exciting lesson for me in how focus and expectations shape life experience. As long as we focused attention on the ugliness of the porch and expected the project to be as bad or worse than previous projects, our porch languished. The turning point came when we realized that our front porch could be the getaway we were seeking elsewhere. This insight allowed us to use our imaginations to focus on the feelings we wanted to experience sitting in our porch, enjoying life. After that, all that we did was motivated by this enjoyment: enjoying the progress as we inched along, enjoying the fact that we were finally doing it ourselves, enjoying the way we were solving problems we’d never solved before, enjoying that what we were doing was good enough and didn’t need to be perfect, enjoying that we were creating the place we wanted to escape to.
On the surface, my front porch example might seem far removed from my career counseling practice and the lives of my clients, but it’s really the same underlying process at work. It’s one of life’s many opportunities for “shifting the pattern.”
Here are two essential questions:
What am I focussing on?
Am I preoccupied with what I don’t like, what doesn’t work, what won’t happen, and what feels awful? Or am I allowing myself to anticipate feeling how I want to feel in a new opportunity, and feeling it right now? Am I allowing the pattern to shift within me?
What am I expecting?
Am I imagining, and thus creating, a series of disappointments that bring more of what I don’t want into my life? Or am I opening myself to change, considering new possibilities, discovering interesting things, and creating what I want? Am I allowing the pattern to shift my experience?
The most amazing thing to me is that we don’t have to start out knowing what we want in order to experience what will fulfill us; what is necessary is that we allow ourselves to feel our yearnings and also feel worthy of them. As soon as we are able to give them our loving, focused attention—whether or not they are logical, practical, possible, affordable—the pattern is already shifting.
With gratitude,
Laurie Mattila
I wish you a gentle, healing end to this year and all that it has been for you. As the new year begins, I hope you will be blessed with a vital desire to live your intentions and the courage to be perfectly you.
I'm including links that take you back to three Front Page articles I've written for December issues of this newsletter in earlier years. If you enjoy them, think about sharing them with other readers you know.
Spilling Over With Joy from December 2005
The Necessity of Darkness from December 2004
Those Deep-Swimming Longings from December 2002
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