Musings on Oscar the Grouch

I was asked recently, while at a workshop, to write a list of 10 “pearls of wisdom” that my 99-year-old self would want the world to know.  I’ve been silent on the blog waves for many months, but I’m back – and for the next couple weeks, I want to share some of my pearls.

Here’s where I’m starting: Your fear of making messes is making your life smaller than it needs to be.

As a coach and someone who works in personal development, here’s something that rings true: the things we can’t be with rule our lives.  For me, one of the things I couldn’t be with was messes.

I don’t mean physical messes so much.  I am not one to cry over spilled milk in real life.  I have also been known to make a pile or two around the house, leave my not-quite-dirty t-shirt on the floor of the closet, and not wash my coffee milk steamer until dinnertime. I’m not often accused of being fastidious.

The messes I couldn’t be with are more in the human realm.  I used to hate, for example, being emotional in front of others.  Tears and snot felt very messy. Being too loud or too demanding or too angry? Big messes, to be avoided at high cost. Conflict was like being in a landfill: really a smelly, hold-your-nose level of nightmare for me. And hurting anyone else’s feelings was, perhaps, the messiest of all the messes.

So, my fear of messes had me holding my breath and holding my arms in at the elbows, afraid to bump into anything or knock something over or – really – take up any space at all. That’s a pretty small way to live.  Because it ensured that I rarely said things that would rock the boat, even if they needed to be said. I swallowed a lot of anger and cried a lot of tears by myself.

When I decided that I didn’t want to live that way (the why of which is the topic for a longer blog than this one), someone asked me to create a daily reminder to do things differently.  A print of Oscar the Grouch now lives on my wall. That guy lives in a trash can, for God’s sake, and I imagine he smells awful.  He is snarky and grumpy all the time. He whines.  And yet, in the world of Sesame Street and beyond, he is undoubtedly beloved. In his own strange way.

My life has, in fact, gotten really messy. I’ve given all my scaffolding away. I’m tender and snotty and clumsy at times.  But I feel more alive – exponentially so.  And there’s a lot more bigness at hand, too. So stay tuned.

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