Chris Brogan’s latest newsletter this week has me thinking about fit.

(And if you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter, I highly recommend it. I know what you’re thinking–everyone recommends Chris Brogan.  There’s a reason for that.)

At any rate, Chris was talking about not fitting in anywhere, and how that’s probably a good thing.  So if you’re an enneagram 4, and the defining characteristic of your personality is feeling like you don’t fit in, it was definitely going to speak to you.  Loudly.

"Rocket-Bye Baby" (R) Warner Brothers 1956

But as I turned the ideas over in my head a bit, I started thinking about fit in a different way.  In a very healthy way, I stopped singing my personal song of lament about being the switched-at-birth Martian baby in my family.

Instead of thinking about how I’ve always had a hard time fitting in, I started thinking about the relationships, priorities, and activities in my life and how they fit together.  Or more importantly, where they don’t fit well.

"quilt squares" courtesy bewinca on sxc

If my life is a quilt, what doesn’t fit the pattern?  And do those pieces need trimming to fit better, or do they just need to return to the scrap bag?

There must be something in the air this week, because Liz Strauss had an excellent post covering similar ground earlier this week.  Liz’ post is about finding proper fit in working relationships, and the process that helps you get to a better fit.

So what about you?  We talked a little last week about the big thing you still need to let go of to move on.

What doesn’t need to be ditched, but could use some massaging?

How do you figure out whether or not someone or something is going to click neatly into place in your life?

How long does it take you to accept and address the stuff that doesn’t fit?

I got my daughter a crochet kit as part of her Christmas, because she’s been pleading with me to teach her to crochet, or knit, or do SOMETHING with the lovely soft yarns I usually have tucked around Le Maison French most of the time.

As it turns out, apparently the people who produced the aforementioned “Kids Crochet Kit” had an even sketchier grasp of needlecrafts than I do.   There was not a  crochet hook to be found in the kit, but there were two plastic knitting needles, along with some brightly colored yarns.

img courtesy bjearwicke on sxc

My five year old MIGHT have the patience and dexterity for crochet, but neither of us has the patience that me teaching her to knit would require.  So we decided that I would knit her a scarf from the yarn, and she would pick out the colors for the stripes.  I’m currently a little more than half way done (13 of 18 stripes complete!)

Despite being passably decent at crochet, I have never really done well at knitting.  Partly the discrepancy is due to the fact that my mom and grandma both crocheted, and they taught me the basics despite the fact that I am left-handed and they were both righties.

But mostly, I think it’s because crochet stitches are bigger, and most crochet patterns include intentional gaps, so you make visible progress much faster on a crochet project than on a knitting project.

I have two basic speeds for getting myself through life: warp 10 (or hyperspeed, if your geekyness leans more in the direction of Star Wars than Star Trek) and full stop.

I don’t like slow progress much.  I don’t much care for incremental gains. I like blast offs.  I like the Big Finish.  It’s that “marching to pretoria” part in the middle I could do without.

I tend to like projects that I can knock out quickly.  Otherwise, I’ve found my best bet for longer projects is to work on it in bursts, get as far as I can as fast as I can, and then set it aside for something else when I start to lose steam. When I do that, I can usually come back to it later for another burst, and another, till I get it done.

It’s when I try to “push on through” despite having lost all energy and enthusiasm for whatever the work at hand is, that things go really badly.

When I try to “pace myself” it never seems to work out.  Imposing a pace on myself that isn’t natural feels forced.  It usually turns whatever I’m trying to accomplish into a chore. Which sucks away all my motivation and energy pretty quickly.  Ironically, trying to reserve my energy so it will last longer usually has the opposite effect.

So as we enter 2010, a year when there are so many big, can’t-knock-it-out-in-one-shot amazing things I want to accomplish, I need to remember to honor my own natural rhythm and momentum for getting things done.

And. we’re. OFF!

This week, online financial management tool Mint.com saved my bacon, yet again.   Financial guru Dave Ramsey says every married couple has one “free spirit” and one “money nerd.”  Our household is, sadly, the exception to that rule.  We are effectively nerdless.  Hence, managing our money has been a challenge over our 17 years (as of this month!  Go us!) of marriage.

So anyway, in September 2007, in desperation I signed up on Mint, handed over the account numbers for our checking account, and held my breath waiting for mean, greedy h4ck0rz to steal all our money.

That hasn’t happened, happily enough.  Instead, it was like handing over our finances to a fairly competent (not to mention free) bookkeeper.  Mint is like a free web version of Quicken without the data entry.  Instead of asking you to create a budget, it creates one itself based on what you actually typically spend, and what you make.  You can then adjust that budget, if you want to cut back in certain areas, but your starting point is present reality–what you’re currently spending.

How refreshing is that?  Especially compared to being told “This is a proper budget.  No matter that it bears no resemblance to the way you currently handle your money.  Follow it anyway.”

This is embarrassing to admit, but we used to get overdrafted.  A lot.  And I swear I remember logging into the online account management tool for our bank (which shall remain nameless), and setting up “low balance alerts” to come to our email addresses and/or mobile phones.

Yet oddly enough, those low balance warnings never seemed to make it to our inboxes or cell phones.

The overdraft fee notices, on the contrary, were always remarkably prompt.

Consider me officially out of practice. With everything.

I’m currently a somewhat lapsed devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system for personal productivity and organization, FlyLady‘s household management system, David K. Reynold‘s Constructive Living therapy, Dr. Willard Harley’s Marriage Builders program, and Sacred Space/Pray-As-You-Go‘s daily prayer practice.

What do all these things have in common? They each touch on big, massive, shudder-when-you-think-about-it Major Life Goals.

• Getting your schedule under control and making sure you get what’s most important to you accomplished.
• Creating an uncluttered, nurturing, non-chaotic home environment for your family.
• Managing your neurotic emotions and living consciously and gratefully in the present.
• Protecting and enriching your lifelong romantic partnership.
• Developing a rich, reflective inner spiritual life centered in the presence of God.

Whoa.  Big stuff, there, right?  It makes my head hurt just thinking about any one of them, much less all of them.  But the thing is, I want all of them.

Except each of these different systems, different programs or frameworks, focus on the small stuff. They don’t focus on the elephant you’ve got to devour.  They focus on the next bite.  What’s my Next Action?  How much clutter can I clear in a 15 minute burst of activity?  What needs doing, despite what I’m feeling?   What is the most effective thing I can do each day to demonstrate love to my spouse?  What’s happened in the last 24 hours, and where do I feel God’s presence or absence?

These are manageable things. I can think about each of these questions without feeling a headache or a vague sense of panic and overwhelm.  I can attack any (and maybe all) of those questions in the course of a single day, with all the energy and enthusiasm I have available for that day.

Ultimately, it comes down to practices. A “practice” is something we do because we’re not perfect–but we’d like to be better.   Usually, it’s something we have to do daily, or at most weekly, because if we don’t, we get “out of practice.”  We lose what we’ve learned, to an extent.   But the nice thing is, most practices are like riding a bike–we may get rusty, but if we mastered it once, we can generally pick it up again.

With a little more practice.

img courtesy torli