What Distraction Is Attractive

Oh, man, I love my purse.  It is perfect for a busy Catholic woman like me.  I like to load it to the max and carry it on one shoulder. It’s got everything in there—my Rosary, hair spray, and two different pairs of sunglasses.   I keep my chiropractor’s business thriving by trying to keep my hips aligned after lugging my 10-ton purse everywhere.

This purse has so many pockets.  There are a total of four pockets on the outside and eight pockets on the inside.  I have room for my three different checkbooks:  work, home, and K4J (Kids for Jesus).  I can also fit my wallet, my money clip, six to eight pens, every receipt I have received from the last two months, etc.  I think you are getting the picture.   I totally used those pockets to put everything where it needed to go.  It was slick.

Then I hit a snag.

The zipper in the outside pocket started to get worn.  It would not close completely.  Shucks! That was the pocket where I kept two of my checkbooks and my money clip.  I couldn’t keep them in there now; they might fall out of the pocket.  I had to switch things around in my purse.

I never got things to work quite right after the zipper was damaged.  I couldn’t seem to get  it together.  Things would go in my purse but I struggled to find them when it was time to pull them out.  Errands started to become stressful because I never knew how long it would take me to dig up my credit card somewhere in my purse.

I hit a crescendo with the purse issue when I was trying to pay my hairdresser for me and my kids’ haircuts.  We finished the haircuts in time to attend my daughter, Gianna’s, gymnastic parent meeting at the Y, but I then I had to spend the next 10 minutes looking for our keys somewhere in the bottom of my purse.  My frustration grew as I had to remove almost every item from my purse just so I could find the keys.  My hairdresser was talking to me the entire time but I was too distracted to even hear what she was saying.

Being distracted is not attractive, nor is it a recipe for healthy relationships.

We have bodies as well as souls.  Not having good systems for managing the material things in our lives usually lead to having less time to invest in healthy relationships with others.

Catholic Women’s Guide to Healthy Relationship Tip:  Create or update a system or process you currently do.  Look for ways to make yourself more available and present for the people in your life. We are to become masters of this world.  This mastery includes developing an organized enough lifestyle to consistently put people ahead of things, so we can always fully live in the present like Christ did.