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Care Package Archive

Rejuvenating and practical frameworks for creating Clarity and Wellness in all areas of your life.

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Care Packages🤲🏽

You know when someone who loves you sends you a parcel with a bunch of goodies in it? I’m endeared to the care package (in whatever form it comes) as a way of making, way of caring, way of sharing. There’s no shortage of possibility as to how a care package presents, what it contains, what assortments are collected, how it’s delivered, how it’s received, and what it might mean to it’s recipients.

I value that this orientation toward making and giving can bring together items that you don’t always see together. You’re simply giving what’s needed and what might land as care. I like when a care package is a sweet collection of some practical stuffs and also things for pure enjoyment (maybe highlighting the functionality of joy and pleasure to our survival); a mix of things you can use in the long run plus some things to use right now. A box containing socks, a nice notebook, some chocolate, a bag of rice.

I like both mail and creating with the intention to give, so the Care Package holds a place in my heart. I send the people on my list a weekly (email) Care Package 🤲🏽. I write them with the intention of both holding space for all the positive possibility that you radiate, and to be of real tangible use. Ideas that you can grab onto, that make a difference in your life.

I created the Care Package Archive to collect these packages all in one place. Sign up if ya wanna receive em straight to your inbox.

CARE PACKAGE 13 🤲🏽 How’d I Get in This Mess?! Who Did This?!

How’d I get in this mess?! Who did this?!

Have you ever been in a situation where you think “how did I end up here?”, “How did it get to this?”, or even “why is this being done to me?”

I’ve learned, the long and hard way, that all messes (spatial, mental, regarding health, wealth, relationships, literally anything)… they are all the same and you are responsible for them all. A few points to lay the groundwork:

All messes are created by a lowering of standards. Standards are a form of structure and when we let them go our sense of orientation tumbles and mudslides. 

Creating and upholding standards for ourselves can be both additive and subtractive. We tend to think about the additive aspect of standards (what will I do) but there are also subtractive forms of standards (what will I not do or what will I not tolerate). Boundaries are an example of this that are extremely relevant in situations where we feel victimized (“why is this happening to me”). 

Nothing is happening to you. You always have choice. Because victim mentality doesn’t help anyone, I’m an advocate of always taking responsibility for what’s going on, even in situations in which you feel you’re being enacted upon. There is a way that you can have positive influence over all areas of your life, and that way includes not giving away your personal power with victim-mentality.

Let’s bring this subject down to some tangible examples:

Standards in the home look like: I always hang my jacket up when I come inside, I always make sure my clothes are put away before I leave the house, I always wash my dishes right after using them.

A mess in the home happens when we little by little compromise our standards.

Making compromises to your standards looks like: I always hang my jacket up when I come inside, but I feel like tossing it on the sofa today; I always make sure my clothes are put away before I leave the house, but I’m leaving them sprawled on the bed and dresser today; I always wash my dishes right after using them, but I don’t feel like it today.

Outside of the home standards look like: I’m friends with people who are loving and respectful, I always find my center before communicating about important matters, I always follow through on what I say I’ll do.

Making compromises to these standards can look like: I’m friends with people who are loving and respectful, but there’s someone who I tolerate continually being very rude and disrespectful to me; I always find my center before communicating about important matters, but I’m so upset I’m going to call the person and react right now; I always follow through on what I say I’ll do, but I’m not going to this time.

The thing that you tell yourself is “it’s not the end of the world if I compromise this one time.” “It’s not going to make that big of a difference.” But let me explain why this thinking trips you up.

A few things to realize about creating and upholding standards for ourselves:

1) Standards are structure. Creating and upholding standards is highly constructive; It is how we build our reality.

2) Creating and upholding standards is an act of maintenance. All of the profundity and principles of maintenance apply to standards, the most important being the cumulative nature of maintenance.

3) Standards are choices that we make about our life, which makes them naturally clarifying. Example: “I’m clear on this subject, I always hang up my jacket, i don’t tolerate mistreatment, and I always clean dishes after using them.”

When you really understand the role that standards play you not only understand the inner and pre workings of all types of messes, you also realize that it’s not a matter of whether life will go on or not, it’s recognizing how truly powerful all of your choices are and the actual consequence of them.

1) Now that you understand standards=structure and that creating and upholding meaningful standards is constructive, it becomes clear that compromising standards is destructive to what we’re building.

2) A mess isn’t overwhelming until suddenly it is. But we know that it doesn’t actually happen suddenly, it happens when we little by little compromise standards because both mess and maintenance are cumulative. Here in lies the profundity of maintenance. The example that I like to use is the routine of a weekly household clean. Cleaning weekly is so so easy, beneficial, and proactive. And it’s exactly because it lives at this sweet spot of giving back far more than it takes, that we think we don’t need to do it. After a week your home may not be very dirty so you think “I don’t need to this week”. But that’s exactly why you should do it. 

3) Standards are points of your own clarity actualized in your reality. Your standards keep clarity within sight and feeling. Compromising your clarity is a slippery slope into clutter and confusion. When you compromise your standards you completely change the landscape. It’s kind of like white balance with cameras. Before shooting anything on a camera you do what’s called a white balance (holding a white sheet of paper, essentially, so that the camera can identify what white is to make sense of the other colors and shades coming through the lense). That’s similiarly illustrative of creating clarity in our lives, and maintaining those standards. Once they’re compromised we don’t have the same reference points.

Dismantling restrictive structures and constructing conducive conditions,

Loretta

Originally shared 9 June 2021

Loretta Barrera