Wednesday -- Works for Me -- Rebooting the System

If you sometimes have days or weeks when, if you were playing Monopoly, it would be summed up by: "Do not pass Go; go directly to jail," then it could be helpful for you, as it has been for me, to have a mental equivalent of a card that says, "Move to Go and collect $2000"

Another way of putting it: when the computer is in the midst of crashing, sometimes it's a good idea to simply hit the reboot button and start again from scratch.

I seem to have regular times in my life when everything is really piling up, mentally and emotionally, and it is discouraging. What seems to help quite a bit is just giving myself a free day pass, mentally and emotionally.

I don't mean that I take the day off, because then, of course, you have an even bigger pile facing you the next day, if you're a homeschooling mom of several, or even if you're not.

I mean that I pretend to myself that I'm a new person coming in to face the old mess. If my kid is showing signs of poor training, I don't bother to feel discouraged; I just figure out how to tackle the problem. Messy floor and unwiped counter? I will move on to deal with it; I won't dwell on the character or physical failings that got it like that.

I'll start from scratch. Every day can potentially be a chance to start over again. Playing it as a pretend game just helps me see it more clearly.

Anyway, it works for me. I usually do this about ten or a dozen times in a year, and it really does help.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”

(This doesn't exactly relate, but when I was looking for a quote from Edith Stein on beginning a new life each morning, I found this site: Saints on the subject of prayer)