Sign in Notre Dame, Paris
I’m with a friend in San Diego, and we stop by a market to grab a deli sandwich, on our way to a workshop.
I’ll have the Lindsey Special, I told the young man behind the counter. (Bacon, turkey, avocado and cheese. . .slathered with more cholesterol.)
What kind of cheese, he asked.
No cheese.
We can’t do that sir.
Excuse me?
With this special, we have to give you the cheese.
But I won’t eat the cheese.
Then we’ll have to charge you more if you order the sandwich without the cheese.
Why?
It’s against the rules to give you a sandwich, and leave off the cheese.
Okay. (Thinking I’m in a Monty Python skit.) But, I’ll just take the cheese off.
We can put it on the side, he offered.
Okay.
I received my sandwich, along with a large plastic container, with a single slice of cheese.
I’m tempted to keep the container as a reminder of how easy it is to miss what is important while focusing on what is trivial (yet, for some reason, urgent). To miss what is real, while focusing on what is “right.”
Lord only knows how much energy we give to protecting that “slice of cheese”. . .
I spent three days in Anaheim, CA teaching about The Power of Pause, days stretched by meetings and social commitments to the point of exhaustion. Reading the news, I discovered that I missed the National Day of Unplugging, the brainchild of a New York group call Reboot. A day set aside as a reminder of our need for Sabbath. It’s a good idea. But I had a good reason to miss it: I was busy telling people about it. Maybe next time I’ll just practice it.
There are a lot of changes afoot (I love that word) on the TerryHershey website, and I’ll keep you up to date as those unfold.
Speaking of business — at one of my seminars, I asked for people to talk about the ways we try to solve the problem of busyness by using the same “technology” that got us in hot water in the first place. Teresa offered this insight, “I’m the one at Congress in Anaheim who complained that I spend too much time on Facebook with people I never stayed friends with over the last 20 years! I think I’m better off making new friends.” Thanks Teresa. She’s talking about the new Terry Hershey Facebook Fan Page. Come join us. This will be a bulletin board for resources (stories, photos, recommended websites and books and YouTube videos and quotes and poems) about pausing, slowing down, “days of unplugging” and maybe, just maybe. . .giving up the energy it requires to hang on to that slice of cheese.
