Should vs. Want

Raise your hand if you’ve ever spent a lot of money on a textbook for a class you really didn’t want to take.

I have a vivid memory of waiting in line in a college bookstore to buy an 800-page statistics manual for a quantitative methods course in an MBA program. I was recently divorced, in my mid-forties, re-entering the work world, and this was the prescribed credential.

But as I inched closer to the checkout area, I happened to pass the Art History section and my heart beat faster as book cover images of Gothic cathedrals, Old Masters and Impressionist landscapes caught my eye. A powerful urge to abandon multivariate data analysis for Degas’ ballerinas came over me, but I dutifully held on to the textbook, even as it grew heavier in my arms.

Aging is also sharpening my awareness of having less time and strengthening the pull of things I want to do, e.g., meditate, take walks in the open space of sea and sky, study the spiritual wisdom of great teachers and leaders.

I now look back on this with regret, not because I think pursuing the MBA was the wrong thing to do, but because it never occurred to me that there could be room in my life for both the practical and the beautiful, the linear and the creative, the compulsory and the exciting.

I only knew how to be a good student and assimilate what I was given, not how to name my dreams and take ownership of my desires by honoring them with small, deliberate actions.

Seeing Janson’s History of Art on the shelf, I longed to sit on the floor of the crowded bookstore and thumb through it, and though I ignored this prompting of my heart, it did help me see for the first time the struggle in me between what I felt I should do and what I wanted to do.

In the twenty-plus years since, I’ve gained a better understanding of why it’s so difficult to give myself what I most want. I can see plainly that as a woman from long line of self-sacrificing females, I am predisposed toward getting all my work done before I can allow myself to play. And though this awareness doesn’t always translate into actually making the best choices, it’s a good starting point.

For those who are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, my MBTI profile contains a J, which means I’m a Judging rather than a Perceiving type. For those who are not, this simply means that in dealing with the world around me, I have a clear preference for planning and decision-making over being open to possibilities and making free-form use of my time.

I once watched my husband do an MBTI exercise with a group of educators who worked for the State of Connecticut. He tore two sheets of paper from a flip chart and taped them to opposite walls of the room. On one of the sheets he wrote in large letters, “I have to get my work done before I can play,” and on the other, “I can play any time.” He then asked the participants to place themselves where they fit along the imaginary line between the two poles.

The women, including me, congregated at or near the work-done side. The men, including my husband, placed themselves close to the play-any-time side, and we women were envious. I don’t remember anyone being in the middle.

I can see how this plays out around our house on a Saturday morning. Right after breakfast I start the laundry, spend several hours in the kitchen cooking for the coming week, tackle a cleaning project, etc.

My husband spends his morning playing music, reading or writing, and then, just about the time I’m ready to quit, he starts his chores.

In other words, he does what is most important to him first while he has the energy to be fully engaged. I, on the other hand, tend to start out with a small list of to-dos, get diverted by others that come up along the way, and can wind up doing housework until mid-afternoon. By the time I’m done and ready for the “for-me” activities, I’m too tired to fully enjoy them.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to pull my husband over into the let’s-get-all-the-work-done-first camp instead of focusing on my own choices and figuring out how to amend my behaviors so that I can become more joyful in my work and more purposeful in my play.

I’ve also noticed that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly curious about the other end of the spectrum and more eager to try it out than I used to be. I’m less confined by all-or-nothing thinking and satisfied with small victories over old patterns.

Aging is also sharpening my awareness of having less time and strengthening the pull of things I want to do, e.g., meditate, take walks in the open space of sea and sky, study the spiritual wisdom of great teachers and leaders.

My decision to give these things priority is as practical as the one I made in the book store, for as my physical stamina and mental acuity flicker, if I want to keep doing the work that’s important to me, helping others, I will have to know how to make new choices.