Leap

I just found this Quotable Card, and it explains my summer thus far. I haven't blogged in a while, and my last few posts dealt with balance, time, and fear. Leaving the familiarity of one of my two jobs and starting grad school was scary for me. Trying to balance my schedule was challenging. There were a lot of new things to adjust to - grad school was new, going to school entirely online was new, and this was my first time working at a public library during the summer reading program, so that was new. New things can be intimidating to me. If I haven't done it before, I don't know if I can do well at it, and the perfectionist in me always wants to do well. This fear of not performing well can lead me to get stuck in a rut and shy away from new experiences. I am so glad that I said a prayer (well, many) and took a leap of faith. A safety net definitely appeared, and not only did I just get through everything, I enjoyed all of it. I hope that I continue to pick faith over fear and try new things in the future. I am not spontaneous by nature. I am a scheduled person, and I like that about myself. But, taking a leap is good, and trusting that God will get me through makes it even better.

Present Moment

Latin poet Horace wrote "carpe diem." Jonathan Larson, in the musical Rent, wrote "no day but today!" And then there is that quote from Alice Morse Earle that makes it in all of the greeting cards: "Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present." 

It may not be as catchy as those quotes, but I like the quote from Buddha. Easier said than done, I'm afraid. For the past week or two I have consumed by my school work. I did school work, went to work, ate, and slept. That was about it. I felt terrible, but I also felt like I had to keep working. I was terribly afraid of getting behind. I was so consumed with what might go wrong in the future that I had completely lost sight of the present moment. I wasn't living wisely or earnestly. I was just working because I didn't want to have that hanging over my head the next day. But when the next day came, there was more work to be done.

Life lived for tomorrow will always be just a day away from being realized. -- Leo Buscaglia

I just found that quote and I feel it summarizes my last week or two. And the irony is, I was never behind in my work. I am actually almost never behind in my work, but I am always afraid I will be (which goes back to my post on fear).

Over the weekend, my husband reminded me of something he read in a book by Doug Fields: Doug breaks his day into three parts - morning, afternoon, and evening - and will not work for more than two parts of a day. I like that. I have work to do, and I want to do it. I like my job at the library and am enjoying school. But I don't want to become consumed by them and always be a day away from realizing my life. I want to live wisely and earnestly and appreciate the many blessings I have been given. And so, I borrow words from the great Jane Austen and ask:

Teach us...that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour, as it passes.

Balance

I've been wanting to post for a while. I've had several ideas floating around in my head, but I just haven't gotten to them yet. I am still learning to balance my new schedule of full-time grad school and part-time work. Neither schedule is very predictable, which makes it difficult to make a permanent daily schedule as I hoped to do. I want to do well at both things, but I also want to have time to exercise, cook healthy food, read for pleasure, play with my dogs, write on my blog, and spend time with my husband, friends, and family, oh, and sleep. It is difficult to learn how to prioritize, but I'm working on it. Balance will come.

Fear

I have a confession to make. I have written on this blog about the glory of nature and how I believe that every creature is sacred. Well, I lied.

House centipedes, or gazillion-leg bugs as I call them, are of the devil. I despise them. They bring out the worst in me. I think of myself as a peaceable person. I don't often shout. I am almost never violent. But all of this changes if there is a centipede in my house. I yell, threaten, and curse the creature's offspring. I get out the bug killer and spray half of the can on the leggy thing. And then I cower in another room until my husband can remove the body.

Why do I cower? Because the real reason that I despise centipedes is because they scare me. Bugs and creepy-crawlies in general don't bother me much. If there is a spider in the house, I take it outside. I've held snakes and had pet lizards. But I'm afraid of centipedes. And that fear leads me to do things I wouldn't usually do and say things I wouldn't usually say. I am not proud of this part of myself.

This goes beyond bugs, of course. Don't we all have areas of our lives where we give in to fear? Taylor Haley spoke at my church a few weeks ago and said that fear and faith cannot exist at the same time. That idea has been resonating with me. I've been trying to seek out these areas of my life and choose faith over fear. I've also been trying to live the famous quote by Eleanor Roosevelt and do one thing every day that scares me. These things that I'm doing are small things, but they are meaningful leaps of faith, a good beginning. It feels amazing to trust God and start to let go of my fears.

I'm making progress, but it is going to take a lot of growing before I am ready to befriend a centipede.

Belief-O-Matic

I just took the Belief-O-Matic sorter on BeliefNet. I hadn't taken it in several years, and I thought it would be fun to take it again. I love personality/belief sorters (I don't call them tests because they don't have right or wrong answers.) -  from something like Belief-O-Matic, which has a funny name but is actually serious, to the silly ones on Facebook like What Part of a Fairy Tale Are You? (I'm the magic wand.) I took time to really think about my answers for the Belief-O-Matic and not just click the answer that I have heard the most. I really had to dig deeply for some of the questions. I agreed with my outcome. It had changed slightly since I last taken it, which I feel reflects some of the shifts in my beliefs.

I'm not against sharing my results (and I've already talked about my faith some on this blog), but I don't want to seem to be promoting one branch of my religion over another. When it comes to faith and religion, I think conversations are often more divisive than anything else. They turn angry, even hateful, as one religion (or branch within a religion) accuses another of blasphemy. Ironically, such behavior goes against the tenants of many, if not all, of the world's major religions. I do shy away from talking about my faith sometimes for fear of a hostile conversation. Discussing disagreements in beliefs is good. Keeping an open mind and hearing what someone else believes while exploring your own views can lead to growth.

I wanted to share this sorter because it helped me to explore my faith a little bit, and I thought someone else in cyberland might enjoy it too. BeliefNet has information about many belief systems, and you can explore this information without taking the sorter. Read, explore, discuss, but please, don't let differences in beliefs lead to hostility.

Cat Dumbbells (or How Pets Improve Your Health)

My dogs, Marley and Melvin

I just read an article on WebMD called "27 Ways Pets Can Improve Your Health." I have always loved dogs and was interested to learn more about the health benefits they can provide.

Therapists prescribe time with a pet to help combat depression. Fifteen to thirty minutes with a pet lowers cortisol (stress hormone) levels and increases serotonin (your brain's happy juice). I didn't realize that some therapists have also started using dogs in therapy sessions. 

Certified therapy dogs visit patients in hospitals and nursing homes to boost their mood. (I actually hope to get my dog Marley certified some day.) Dogs can also be trained to help people with epilepsy, diabetes, and Parkinson's disease.

Owning a dog or cat lowers your blood pressure and your risk for heart disease, and children who grow up with fuzzy pets are less likely to develop allergies and more likely to have strong immune systems.

And, this was my favorite part of the article, while discussing how pets can improve your level of physical fitness it said that "some people like to use their cat rather than dumbbells when doing weight training." Fantastic.

(To hear what my dog Marley has to say, check out TheMarleyBug on Twitter.)

This Book Is Overdue!

This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson has been circulating among the staff at the library where I work. It's an enjoyable read about modern libraries and librarians. Her stories show that the librarian stereotype - a prim bespectacled woman shushing patrons while surrounded by dusty piles of books - no longer applies. Each chapter examines a different aspect of modern libraries in the digital age.

Chapter 6, "How to Change the World," explores a distance learning graduate program, mainly for students in emerging nations, that is "designed to give people around the world some useful tools for promoting social justice: a program that would enable students to remain in their communities while learning how to investigate, document, and fight injustice using the Internet." Full scholarships and laptops are given to students from emerging countries, and they all meet in Rome for two weeks before pursuing the rest of the degree online. I had never heard of anything like this. I love the thought of providing access to information to students and communities who did not have it before and, as Johnson puts it, "creat[ing] and activist community across language barriers and time zones."

Chapter 10 dives into the New York Public Library including the Design by the Book video project, which followed "five young artists from their visits to the NYPL to their studios to their final art projects." The idea was to use library resources to inspire artists' creations. I think that is a fantastic idea! (Here are links to the other three videos: Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4.)

These are just two of the stories in This Book Is Overdue! Others include librarians standing up to the FBI, librarians taking to the streets during political conventions to provide information to protesters, and the librarian craze on the virtual world Second Life. Johnson isn't a librarian and you don't have to be to enjoy her humorous and informative stories.