Me: “Honey, where did all these buckets come from? I swear they must be mating while we’re out of the house.”
My wife: “I bought more from IKEA. We needed more storage.”
Me: IKEA is Swedish for “There’s a bucket for everything.” One day I’m going to come home and there will be a bucket for me to get into.
My wife: that would be nice.
I concede the fact that buckets and baskets and little compartments can be very helpful when you’re organizing your home. But maybe they’re not so helpful when it comes to managing our lives.
It is natural to think of our daily life in terms of buckets, in a compartmentalized way. There’s our family, our primary relationship, our work, our wealth, our health, our friendships, our faith, our leisure and so on.
This makes sense on one level because the various buckets usually include different people, require us to play different roles and often tend to be very separate from each other.
It can even help us feel better about ourselves in that, if one bucket is sparse, fullness in another is encouraging. If one bucket is empty, we can focus on filling another.
But one of the most dangerous effects of viewing and operating our lives like this is that it can erode our integrity.
Integrity? What does that have to do with any of this?
We think of integrity in terms of not stealing paper clips from the office or making sure that we’ll do what we say we’ll do or that we’re the same person in private as we are in public. Certainly all of that is related to what it means and are good things to consider.
But what if we thought about integrity as the opposite of dis-integration.
If we are honest, I think many of us would admit to feelings of disintegration, disconnection, fragmentation; like we’re coming apart or being pulled in too many directions.
I would suggest that one of the main reasons for this is that we engage in the various aspects of life as disconnected compartments and not as an integrated whole. We live in an illusion that all of these “buckets” are separate from each other.
The same "me" works, sleeps, spends, and interacts—whether in the boardroom or the bedroom. Failing to recognize this unity leads to feelings of disintegration and disconnection. We need to admit that what happens at work or home or Vegas NEVER just stays there. Likewise, we are inevitably deeply affected by an empty or sparsely filled bucket even as we experience overflowing success in another bucket.
The reason is… You.
As the late Harvard professor and Priest Henri Nouwen astutely observed, “wherever I go, there I am.”
To be and feel truly integrated, we need to first recognize that the buckets are all connected and related. If we are living with deprivation in one or more for any length of time, it will affect the rest. We cannot keep one or two buckets separate or completely hidden from anyone else without eventually showing up “publicly” amongst the rest.
It takes courage to examine our lives and look for where there might be signs of disintegration:
- Consider the buckets of marriage/dating, family, friendships, health, faith and work (feel free to add more), are any sparse or empty right now?
- If I consider my resources in terms of time, energy and money, which buckets are getting the majority of my investment?
- Is there any bucket where I am hiding part or all of it from anyone else?
PS. If you’re curious or a bit unsettled at this exploration, stay tuned for more to come on this topic. That said if the topic resonated with you, I would love to hear from you by providing either a comment with your perspective, question or anecdote.
