It was Halloween, and all the weather forecasts said to expect rain. Parents everywhere were scrambling to find raincoats or other means by which to keep their children dry on their special night.
I ran into Rosie while waiting in a busy video store line. She spontaneously blurted out how frazzled and overwhelmed she was. “My mind is all over the place! My doctor says I have ADD.”
Somehow it came out that I was a psychiatrist, and so did the story of her life. “I am so fragmented, I feel overwhelmed all the time, my mind is scattered, I can’t focus, my marriage fell apart, I’m having problems at work. I focus on a million things at once and I can’t seem to get anything done. Do you think I need medication?”
The video line inched forward.
Rosie was the mother of two girls aged four and six, and had the harried look of an American mom with way too much to do and too little time in which to do it. She worked full-time both at home and at a high-tech company, where she worked as a low-level administrative assistant. Rosie was not a wealthy woman, and so she was limited to discount, thrift, and Goodwill stores to find raincoats for her two little girls.
Halloween came on a Friday that year. She did not have a lot of time, but nothing in the world meant more to her than her daughters and she would do anything and everything for their happiness and well-being. On this day, that meant finding two raincoats in a dense urban area where demand was high, supply was low, and parents were desperate.
After a morning of phone calls, pleading, threatening, and the unapologetic use of friends, family and sales people, she found what she was looking for. She quickly made an excuse to leave work early for lunch and drove across town to collect her treasure at a Ross discount store half an hour from where she worked. She cajoled a salesman over the phone to hold the raincoats for her. (Those of you who are familiar with Ross know that’s the equivalent of parting the Red Sea.)
With single-minded purpose clarity and determination – with the alignment of her heart, mind, body and soul – Rosie had done the next to impossible: She found two matching raincoats for her children on the same day every parent in California was trying to do the same thing. She was a paragon of purpose.
She told me this while also telling me how scattered, fragmented, overwhelmed, and the unfocused she was. Curious about the discrepancy, I explained the notion of the Tonal – the alignment of heart, mind, body and soul – and asked her to describe how well she was aligned internally. Without a moment’s hesitation, she signaled with the familiar gesture of left and right index fingers pointing toward each other but in opposite directions.
“I’m like this.”
I responded that she seemed pretty aligned when it came to getting her girls what they needed, to which she agreed. “But it’s the rest of my life that makes me miserable.”
I asked her what it was that she wanted in life, and she replied she wanted to feel peaceful and happy.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Absolutely!”
“What if you were to pursue peace of mind the way you went after your girls’ raincoats?”
Immediately, she got it. The reason she couldn’t find peace in her life was because she was not clear about her purpose – except when it came to raising her children. Everywhere else she was ambivalent and pointed in different directions.
Her eyes widened as she considered the possibilities. “Do you mean if I were to pursue peace in my life the way I pursued my girls’ raincoats, I would find it?”
I could honestly say that if she were to pursue peace as a goal with the determination and single-mindedness that characterized her search for raincoats, she would indeed find it. When it came to her girls, her Tonal was in perfect alignment. When she was clear about what she wanted or needed, and determined to have it, she was quite capable of making it happen.
She did not need medication. She needed clarity about what she wanted from life. Rosie suffered needlessly from a lack of purpose in most of the things she did. She could see immediately how, when it came to her children, her clarity about her priorities made any deficit of attention vanish.
She reached the counter, rented her DVDs and turned around with a smile.
“You are so right,” she said, and with that Rosie turned and walked out of the store with the extraordinary poise that had been in her all along.