Living Life Freely

“If you want to live life freely, take your time go slowly…” – Movie :  Brother Sun…Sister Moon – St. Francis of Assissi

http://www.freedomcounselingusa.com/

 

I have been told many times over about my being – OC – stands for Obsessive Compulsive.  I don’t know if those that gave me such "name"  really had the strictest definition of the words but the contextual definition says that I am sort of rigid in terms of the following:

1.       I want things in place and organized

2.      I don’t do things without planning ahead

3.      I monitor and control condition until the desired result is achieved

4.      I maintain my own planner to monitor how I am doing in a day and carry unimplemented tasks the following day…

…In short … I am really good at organizing … hmmmm in short… how about the term ….RIGID…

When I was employed, I write flows and department procedures such that daily operations including daily tasks are kept tracked and monitored.  Even when I started my pregnancy, I prepared a daily program for my growing fetus…este baby in my tummy.  And  I ended up exhausted and found myself too rigid.

I did wonder at first how I got such behavior.  I could recall when I was a kid, I would observe my own mother’s way of running our home such that, she got angry with a messy house.  She wanted things in place.  When I was seriously ill and I had to stay home to recover from the hospital, I observed my own mother fixed and produced a neat bed for me, changed my soaking wet with sweat clothes, changed the curtains in the room just to produce a neat place for me to stay and it felt good to have things around me so organized that I easily recovered from my illness because of that gesture of love and kindness.  

I saw my own older sister copied the same strategy.  And I felt that having things organized could really make things easier at home.  I brought this behavior in school until I got into the world of work.  I like so much organizing and it is so easy to trace where problems started, how they started, etc. and to find intervention and solutions.

However, along the way, I found some extremes with it.  Take for example when I and my husband moved in together after the wedding.  I stuck with my ways of doing things that it led me to be uncomfortable and worst angry when things are not the way they should be.  I became rigid with things and it affected my relationship with my own husband. 

How did I painstakingly learn from the process?  From my husband I learned the following:

1.       He has his own way of doing things – ways of organizing and the time he would do it

2.      More than procedures and rigidity, relationship is more important

3.      That we could agree on the best and comfortable ways of organizing things … not alone.. but in partnership with him

4.      Respect my husband's opinions on how things should be

5.      That I could simply allow some mess at times to give way to more important things such as waste time talking with him than fixing things  at home

6.      It is very OK to have a messy house sometimes and deal with them later

7.      I learned to go slow with my own rigid ways of doing things

8.      I set aside planners  for a while to just simply be with him in a day

…and it felt so good to just slow down…to set aside rules, flows and procedures, planners, etc… and to give way to the day’s unplanned events and its surprises…  There is more to rules and procedures…  There is life to spontaneity and it feels so good to be ….FREE:-)