I enjoy doing ongoing dance workshops where the same group meets several times throughout one or even two years. These more in-depth gatherings enable me to get to know other dancers well and the processes we do during the course of them have had an important impact on my ordinary day-to-day behaviour. Often participants are required to do ‘homework’ before or after a session. In 2016, one such task was to do at least five things differently and record how this felt. I looked for opportunities to try this.
One Tuesday afternoon in March, just before I set off to a regular choir commitment to sing with prisoners in Wandsworth prison, I got an email from D, my IT adviser, and fellow choir member, to say she had the replacement printer we had ordered for me on Ebay. She suggested coming to set it up in the brief interval between the end of the prison session (6pm) and the start of our ordinary community choir (7.15pm).
My immediate reaction was: ‘There’s not enough time for this’. Setting up new equipment always seems to take a lot longer than expected. There would be no time to deal with any complications. The difference between me and D in this regard is that I tend to be pessimistic whereas she always appears confident that all will go well, or that, if it does not, she’ll manage to sort things out. My first instinct was to say ‘No!’ but, remembering my homework, I paid attention to three fleeting thoughts that came to mind immediately after that initial reaction.
The first was that D probably wanted to get the printer to me and off her ‘to do’ list.
The second was something I’d gradually come to realize, namely: that whenever I postpone a task (OK, let’s be honest, whenever I procrastinate) I have often regretted doing so and found that there has been some kind of missed opportunity.
The final thought was that it wouldn’t be a life and death matter if my pessimism turned out to be justified and we were late for choir.
My judicious reply to D started with a mildly pessimistic warning about the limited time available to us and expressing my willingness to wait until our regular meeting a fortnight later for the printer to be installed. (I secretly hoped she would take this as ‘No’.) But, I added, I would leave it to her to decide what suited her best. Typically, she chose to attempt it that day.
So, after our prison session D drove me home and set to work. True to my IT karma things did not go smoothly. There were no cartridges in the second-hand printer. At that stage I was ready to abandon the attempt to set it up. For D this was not an option. She turned to the old defunct printer (its cartridges were stuck which is why we had looked for a replacement) and made a determined effort to liberate these and complete the task. Once again I noted how very differently we reacted to the same event: I didn’t expect this to be successful while she was striving to it make it work.
I took a deep breath and surrendered to the situation, behaving in the new, more relaxed way I have been working on in my workshop sessions. I stayed calm, non-critical, non-judgmental and didn’t fuss. I provided D with a variety of screw drivers she needed, made myself a hot drink and started planning to snack on fruit as it seemed likely there would be no time for anything else before choir.
And everything resolved itself without any frustrating feelings. The old cartridges refused to be dislodged. After a determined effort, D accepted this and left. I had sufficient time to heat and eat the small meal I’d prepared in advance, to take the five-minute walk to choir and arrive around my usual time.
These events were indeed fortuitous: we discovered the need to buy printer cartridges and I had them when D and I met a fortnight later. Without this knowledge I would have had to wait even longer for use of the ‘new’ printer. Agreeing to do something that felt uncomfortable and rushed and that interfered with my regular Tuesday afternoon ‘routine’ had been an excellent decision. It also provided me with one example for my ‘homework’; renewed insight into an habitual pattern when faced with the unexpected and a more relaxed approach to responding to these.