Well, I seem to be slowing down the blogging pace again, but that's okay: we're after quality, not quantity here, right? (Right?)

Here's the deal. When there's a lot of change, potential change, and other sorts of stimulation, happening in my life, I tend to experience a kind of overload. There are two factors that go into why that is the case. One is personality. According to various studies, about 20 percent of the population are what are known as Highly Sensitive Persons. A book called (what else?) The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron explains all about this, and just to give you a better idea what I am talkng about, let me give you this quote from the back cover:

Do you have a keen imagination and vivid dreams? (check) Is time alone each day as essential to you as food and water? (check) Are you 'too shy' or 'too sensitive' according to others? (check) Do noise and confusion quickly overwhelm you? (check) If your answers are yes, you may be a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP).

I know that, in our society, having the aforementioned qualities sounds extremely wimpy, but actually it's not. In fact it can be an asset. HSPs feel and see things more deeply--have higher highs and lower lows. But as Aron points out, it's those very qualities that enable them to become great writers, painters, counsellors, advisors, or what-have-you. Therefore recognizing that (being an HSP) is who I am and it's not a bad thing helps me begin to manage and harness it more.

This morning (and to give just a touch of continuity to what's been written here before, you might say this comes under the category of a Good Thing) for instance, I awoke early, like 6:20 a.m. Charity continued to slumber and all was quiet in our tiny perfect apartment. The windows were open, letting in fairly warm and moist, but clean and not yet uncomfortable, air.

I was feelin' lousy about myself once again. Progress on the "goals" front (see earlier posts) was stymied. I stepped on the scales this morning and they showed...212! I'm trendin' the wrong way! I'm still at 3.5 cups of caffeinated coffee a day and the morning devotional time hasn't seemed to make much of a difference lately. And so on....

So anyway, what did I do? I sat there, in the blessed silence (and quietness, as a rule, is one of the amazing things about our apartment in the heart of downtown Toronto two blocks from the Gardiner Expressway) and I tried to pray. I tried to tell God all about my making a mess of things. There were certain things I'd done (which I won't go into) that I was particularly discouraged about, and I talked to God about them. Sitting next to me on the couch were The Message and Tournier's book, but I had no desire to open them.

Next, I opened my massive (the size of an old volume of Encyclopedia Britannica)journal-type book for the year 2000 that someone gave me, and began writing. I just expressed what I've expresed here, and more, but in more detail. I wrote, and I wrote. I got it all out. And a peace began to descend. It wasn't, I was seeing, the end of the world. I could begin again. Life would go on. God was in His heaven and would help.

Then I heard the bedroom door open and eventually Charity appeared, carrying Gus the Cat in her arms like a big baby. She sat down at the other end of the couch, we chatted quietly, and I felt calm.

One thing I take from this--and it's an old lesson--is that every day and morning is different. The way I will be pulled out of a slump in one instance is not necessarily the same way it will happen in another.

Reading The Adventure of Living yesterday, I came across a remark by Tournier about Americans. (He also has positive things to say about Americans in the same book, by the way.) Americans, he said, tend to want someone to give them a formula that they can apply in order to solve problems or implement certain techniques. He said this because some Americans, on a visit there, had been asking him for exactly that with respect to how to practice what Dr. Tournier calls "The Medicine of the Person." He said that he felt embarassed and awkward answering them because the answer, he felt, was not a formulation but rather something a person somehow picks up. (It's something, he might have said, that needs to be "caught rather than taught.")

Anyhow, being American (and Canadian, but Canadians are totally into this as well) to my core, therefore I too have the same tendency to want neat formulae I can apply in order to see measurable results fairly quickly. Perhaps this is what was behind those concrete goals of mine that I've been telling you about.

What I'm saying here is, setting specific goals is still important since it helps a person get out of a sort of fog of self-indulgent introspection. But at the same time I must never forget that (perhaps particularly for me because I am an "HSP," among other things) I always need to put my intution (and my daily dialogue with Christ through prayer and scripture) front and center. My way forward likely never will be in a straight line. I will meander and swerve, stopping to smell the petunias before getting back on the highway, perhaps covering a thousand miles in a morning...

On and on I ramble, but now it is time to put my wheels back onto the pavement and actually get things crossed off my to-do list (shower, scoop kitty litter, wash dishes, etc.) before heading off for a 11:30 a.m. church service (a pefect time for us slow-to-start-of-a-morning, amblin', dreamin' HSPs, perhaps?).