Sometimes it is bad planning –because you said yes to too many things. Sometimes the project that seemed so far away and that you had plenty of time for when you signed up for it comes due just as a boatload of emergencies suddenly strike. And sometimes, you simply realize that it is the month of May.
I don’t know if it is true for you, but it certainly is in my world. May is a crazy time. Two weddings (and a funeral). Confirmation. Two Auction dinners. School Picnic. Mother’s Day. Interviews for a new hire at the Newman Center. Finals fling. Priests’ Council Exec Board. Regular Priests Council meeting. Graduation. And so it goes…
Like many of you reading this, there are many things that demand our time and energy. We do them because they matter to us. We invest our time and energy in our own events as well as in the things that we value for our children. If you want to know what really matters to people, then simply look at the ways they spend their time. Perhaps even more than the pocketbook, our use of time measures what truly matters for us.
So I find myself ‘guarding my calendar’. Trying to say yes when I can, but making sure that I balance those choices with the things that recreate the spirit. It is not always an easy task. And this May, perhaps unlike other years, I realize how necessary it is to “do the do-able, not the impossible” as St. Vincent de Paul says.
In our Good Leaders, Good Shepherds training, they invited us to think about our Key Responsibility Areas. (KRA’s) A simple image to explain this is that of a bucket. If you wrote down all the things you do onto slips and then had to sort them into about 5 buckets, those ‘buckets’ would be your KRA’s.
The challenge to these buckets is to allow them to help set the priorities in your life. Like the junk mail that you sort through and many times discard without ever opening, there are ‘junk events’ that, though you could do, they are not the things that give you energy and/or that God gave you the most gifts and talents for.
Recognizing that has been a great freedom for me, even in the midst of crazy busy days. Do the things that matter most first. To update St. Vincent’s quote: “Do the important and the doable, not the trivial and the impossible…”