For most of my life I have tried to avoid waste. I try to be 100% productive. I try to never make mistakes. I try to get it right the very first time. I despise any kind of waste, but most of all I am terrified to waste my life.
To prevent this tragedy, I busy myself in the business of getting it right. Yet, I am realizing, in all my efforts to get it right, the very waste I am trying to prevent builds up like stinky garbage shoved out of sight. You can’t see it, but the smell is there.
When I was small, I never used things I loved because I didn’t want to waste them. My favorite marker color– I didn’t touch it. My favorite outfit– I barely wore it…only for really special occasions. As I look back on those things, you know what happened? The marker dried up; I couldn’t preserve it simply by not using it. The outfit either stopped fitting or I stopped liking it. In essence I wasted the things I really loved in all my efforts to not waste them.
While I don’t hoard markers anymore, and I am doing much better at actually wearing my clothes, I am realizing there are intangibles in my life that I hoard up and try to control by my perfectionist, productive ways. Mainly I struggle allowing myself to make mistakes, or in giving myself time to learn and grow. I see weakness as a waste that must be fixed.
One area I am learning to let go of this fear of waste in is my writing. Behind the scenes writing for me currently is very unproductive. I have a whole book on my computer I kind of think I may never publish. I have whole blog posts I will completely delete. That kind of thing gets my heart rate up and that old fear rears its ugly head and says waste.
Recently Francine Rivers posted on her blog behind the scenes of writing a novel. She mentioned she has gotten to the end of a book and not liked her characters. Into the shredder her manuscript went. She has written a whole Novella and got to the end of it and realized she has portrayed her message wrong. Into the trash.
I read that blog post a couple times (who are we kidding maybe a hundred) and thanked God for moving her to share her process. She is one of my favorite authors, I do not see her writing as a waste, I see it as a work of art. If she throws hours and hours of work away who am I to say that is a waste? In the end she produced something incredibly beautiful, not mediocre.
Today I made Hawaiian ham and cheese sandwiches. I have made these before, the outcome was not pretty. I sliced too far in to the bottom row making the bottom of the sandwich virtually non-existant. The next time I made them I cut them each individually to avoid said problem. But it was a very bad puzzle to put back together. It was all mismatched and made the ham and cheese hang over in odd unnatural ways. Again, sub-par.
The part of me that despises waste said: give up, you are just wasting your time. Pick another recipe. But I decided to ignore those lies that were telling me they were helping me prevent waste.
Something magical happened, I mastered it. I cut them babies in three rows, then sliced them in half. It was much more manageable that way and I could match them up correctly. I shoved them all back together and laid the ham and cheese on it. At the end I cut them each into individual sandwiches and guess what? They turned out beautiful startling the very reluctant chef inside that there was a possibility I could cook pretty things.
Why do I share this? Because I am realizing all the trying, imperfections, and mistakes…they are not waste. No, instead it is all a process. If we try to skip the process to skip the waste, I believe we skip the very training we need to be extraordinary in something, not mediocre.
When I embrace the messy, unproductive moments as a process instead of a waste, I can breathe better and enjoy the journey more. In God’s economy nothing is a waste, it can be redeemed.
Even those dried up, unused markers…for they showed me I would rather enjoy the things in front of me than never use them at all. Even those flopped sandwiches for the showed me that trying again can lead to success. Even those thrown away words for they showed me that when we aren’t willing to settle for mediocre in the name of productivity, we may just find radiant beauty in the midst of slow and steady.
