Bossing your space

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have a very accommodating personality.

I say this neither out of brag or shame, but just as something I have learned about myself.  I consider myself to be easy to get along with.  (My wife’s eyes just rolled as she read that.)

I like other accommodating people.  Who wouldn’t?  They are so...accommodating.  They don’t have to have their own way.  This means that if you hang around with them you will occasionally get to have your way.

Yet...

Yet I have come to appreciate bossy people.

That word appreciate is carrying a lot of nuance along with it, but let me continue.

Sometimes you are in situations where the dumpster that you are stuck in is on fire.  You and your accommodating friends are all huddled together asking, “What do you want to do?” and answering “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” 

Then a bossy person comes along and says, “Okay, guys, this is the way the corn is going to be shucked. You do this and you do that, he’ll do the other thing, and I will coordinate, and we will get this fire put out.”

They might not say it quite so nicely; they might talk loudly because they have to be heard over the sound of whining; but I can appreciate them as long as the fire gets put out.

To get a task done, there must be control. It would be easy to proceed from here to write an essay about the danger of drifting into Fascism.  That’s just a bit too heavy.  I will let someone write a letter to the editor about it.

Instead, I want to write about the need to take control at certain points.

This first one is for students (and their teachers).  When students do their homework, they need to get control of their environment.  They need an ordered space in which to work.  If they are working at a table or desk, the aforementioned work surface needs to be clear of clutter.  Anything needed for the task--paper, writing implements, books, calculators--need to be at arm’s reach.  The surrounding space should be as free of disturbance as possible.  This means turn off the music and TV.  You say you work better with music on.  I reply with something that comes out of the backside of a male bovine. You need order; you need to be the boss of your environment.

This might involve inconveniencing your family, your roommate, or your spouse.  But here I think I can speak with authority. I’ve been dealing with students who’ve had problems with school for well over a decade now.  Not having stability at home is a very common problem.  Stability isn’t having total control on the environment all the time; it’s having it when you need it.

This next example is where I get to brag about my workshop.  I’ve got the best wife in the world who let me turn our garage into a workshop.  From this, I’ve discovered that if you have a workshop you can do all sorts of things easily that were impossible before.  A workshop, however, isn’t just a room with tools in it.  You have to know where the tools are. You have to know what they do. You have to have your workspace clean and in good order. (All of this for the price of a few honey-dos that you would’ve done anyway.)  

As you see, this is a lot like the way I view doing homework. You have to take control of your environment.  

For accommodating types like me--and maybe you too--this can be difficult.  I’ve never liked to put people out.  It always feels uncomfortable to discover that I have.

The insight that has come with age is that it is okay to make other people accommodate you sometimes.  Indeed, there are some who make others accommodate them all the time and are quite successful and don’t seem to mind being bossy.  As I said at the beginning, they have their uses.

For us accommodators, we don’t ask for much.  We have the right, the need, the obligation to ourselves, to carve out a little space around ourselves every once in a while to control it in order to do what we need to get done.

It’s okay.

You might annoy someone, but they’ll get over it. You always get over it when someone annoys you, and you’re a better person for it.  Give someone else a chance to grow every once in a while. It’s good for them; it’s good for you; it’s good for everybody. 

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.