So my dear friend Dawn recently came back from a visit to her grandmother's house and came up with this assignment for herself. (That is why she and I get along. We're homeschoolers, we know how to give ourselves assignments.) Anyway she calls it project maturity. For her that means that she has to wash her hair more often than she does and she has to send more care packages and go to the dentist and stuff like that. I liked the idea and when I thought about how I could implement it in my life, I realized we all are in some way or another already dealing with project maturity.
Take for example my little brother. (God bless him he just turned 20 on Sunday. Not so little anymore I guess.) He is off in Phoenix going to school and miserable because it is 110 degrees and air conditioning is expensive, his room-mate bailed on him, he is tired of going to school year round and wants a break. Project maturity says too bad. It is hard being 20. Grow up. So you think ok, I'm going to fight it and you stay up too late and rent stupid movies and try to do that nylon over the quarter think at the laundromat and it doesn't work and you wind up having to buy a new industrial washer (not really) but it feels that way and all you're trying to do is make it fun, cause everyone and everything is out to swallow you alive.
So you either get swallowed alive or you figure it out. Some people decide they are very grown up and just get mean, grouchy and self important. Some people decide that they are going to do whatever the hell they want and expect their poor planning to be your crisis and are pissed off when it's not. So how do you meet in the middle? How do you stay young at heart with out fighting the loosing battle with maturity? And how do you love people in the midst of your version of the project and their version of the project?
For me project maturity says sometimes you have to move back in with your parents to save money. It says that when your baby is crying in the middle of the night, and all you want to do is sleep for 10 more minutes, and can't he figure out how to put the passifier back in his own mouth? that you get up and do it because there are things in life that are more important than you. It says that even though you want to sit around and play with photoshop during nap time, that you fold the laundry because you have to pace yourself and this may be your only chance.
So it sounds like project maturity is the devil incarnate and that the only people who actually follow through with all this "responsiblity" are masochistic holier than thous. Well I think that is what I had thought until now.
I think that project maturity has to do more with the common good and being a little less about yourself and a little more about others. It means doing things that need to get done and doing things for someone else before you.
So I took a picture of the kitchen sink. It is empty and clean and if for no other reason I thought it needed documenting. Today Josh came home and after working for 8 hours and commuting for 1.5 he did the dishes. He loaded the dishwasher and started it. Something I've been trying to do for 4 days now. He conquered my beast and although I unloaded the dishwasher and washed all the hand wash items, he got me past the wall I couldn't scale. That is success in the project. He laid in the hammock after that, so he still had time to relax and read is book, but he did for me what I totally should have done and he did it with out complaining.
Now the kitchen isn't glamourous and exciting when it is clean and that is why he did it, and you'll notice that the butter dish still needs to be dealt with and that there are paint brushes on the window sill that need cleaning. But project maturity isn't project perfection, it is just loosening your bonnet a bit to let the "selfish" bee out and putting on your gloves, to be ready for the mess of what's next.
