Autopilot

First off, Christ is Risen!

I don’t want to brush off Pascha (Easter), because it really was nice, and it’s an important celebration in the church year. At the same time, I’m still riding through a bit of a patch here, to be sure.

I almost managed to get the Christmas tree down before Pascha. The garland is off, as are 90% of the ornaments, but I didn’t get the project done when I thought I could get it done, and it’s been sitting here, waiting for me to finish for weeks.

There are just so many things like that, so many different “little” projects calling for my attention. After a couple of months now, I’ve finally gotten my bed cleared from the boxes I “temporarily” put there while clearing out the other bedrooms. It certainly didn’t help my sleep, but it’s taken several hours to go through all the miscellaneous stuff and pare it down to something a bit more manageable, where I can walk around the bed and not have to sleep across it. On the flip side of that, in the process of doing this, I finally hooked up the Blu-Ray player that was on “last chance clearance” that I bought several months ago to my computer monitor and it’s wonderful. (My Amazon list tells me that the splitter I needed for the audio was purchased back in September, so yes, it’s been awhile.)

I managed to get the couch cleared off back in March; immediately there were nine loads of clean laundry that went back on it, and I’ve been struggling to get it under control again.

I’m trying not to get too discouraged, frustrated, or angry about some of these things, but that is effort as well.

I find, too, that a good number of things I’ve been doing have kind of fallen into the category of autopilot, and I’m not thrilled with that. I drive a lot for the kids, and it’s the same roads and the same routes over and over and over again. Sometimes I’ll be driving, and I’ll know I’m on the way, but I’m also not quite sure where I am because it’s everything all over again. I missed the left turn at a *huge* intersection last week, because, apparently, I was just following the person in front of me or something. It wasn’t bad, because there was a “next chance” to turn, but little things like this are starting to drive me a little crazy.

There’s certainly advantages to having an “autopilot” mode; if we know what we’re doing, it doesn’t make sense to have to think about every decision again and again. I’ve even heard of people having several sets of the same clothing so that they don’t have to think about what they are going to wear; it’s going to be the same thing every day. Efficiency.

There’s part of me that’s always railed against this though. Not that the efficiency isn’t a good or helpful thing, but I hate it when I feel pulled into a stream where it hardly feels like it’s my life anymore, that the “autopilot” meant to assist in helping me has become a river pulling me along without any hope of getting out of it.

I’ve been doing poorly with prayer, and when I do get to, say, my list, or the Psalms or what have you, it seems like I’m barely paying attention; that on one hand, I know these things so well, and on the other, I couldn’t tell you what was the line before the one I’m reading. This morning, I got distracted by something totally ridiculous, and I ended up frustrated with myself for not holding the attention.

A little bit of sleep will surely help. I’m hoping that as the school years wind down, I feel a little less pressure all around. I’m hoping too, that the feeling of being on autopilot so much fades a bit too.

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