Phew. It’s been a day. This afternoon I ran some errands, fixed a friend’s dishwasher, downloaded some material for an online course I’m taking, and wrote a blog for someone else (for money!). Then this evening I had dinner with my parents and later installed a chandelier for a friend. This last task took forever. Installing chandeliers almost always does. No two jobs are ever the same. Honestly, I think tonight’s job would have gone easier if I knew in the beginning what I knew in the end–that the wire needed to be so long, the chain needed to be so long, and so on. But these are things I could only find out by experimenting. That’s the deal. My inner slave driver gives me shit for not knowing things there’s no way I could know.

Stop that, inner slave driver.

Now it’s two in the morning, and I’m trying to give myself a break by blogging short. I have to be up in several hours to help my dad kick off his birthday (happy birthday, Dad) by going to the donut shop (his favorite place and one I don’t hate). So I’ll get right to the point.

Since I’m not done with the painting job I’ve been working on lately, I could have painted today. But I needed a rest. My body’s been hurting, and my sinuses have been irritated from all the fumes. Plus, I needed time to run around, to do other jobs. This afternoon I actually thought I’d blog early so I could rest more tonight. But then I installed a software update for my laptop, and the entire process took thirty minutes, which didn’t leave me enough time to write. So here I am now. Anyway, it occurred to me during my laptop’s software update that we all need a software update now and then. That is, most of us are running mental and emotional programs we picked up as children. Tonight the friend I hung the chandelier for said he was so insistent on everything being just so (you should see the two of us together) because his parents used to vacuum themselves out of their house so there wouldn’t be any footprints in the carpet.

Think about that!

My point is that here my friend is, decades later, running his life on an old program. This isn’t a judgment; it’s an observation. Plus, I’m the same way. I really gave myself a tough time for not having things all figured out with the chandelier from step one, and this is typical for me–to insist on perfection. This is an impossible standard, of course, and the fact is I could just as easily be patting myself on the back for trying and learning new things. Because no one ever taught me how to hang a chandelier. I just got curious about it one day, and if it were anyone else doing that, I’d think it was pretty cool.

Way to go, me.

Back to the software analogy, I do think that since starting therapy I’ve been updating my mental and emotional patterns. I’m not nearly as tough on myself (or others) as I used to be, and when I am I let things go more quickly. When I mess up, when I’m not perfect, I don’t imagine that the consequences will be the-sky-is-falling awful. As I recently heard–shit happens, and I’m still enough. This is the biggest software update I think we all need, a shift to the idea that no matter what happens–no matter what–we’re enough, we’re enough, we’re enough.