So, as I’ve said
before here, I’ve been working on slowing down.
Mostly I’ve been noticing what’s going on when I feel rushed and
harried, tense about how busy I am, et cetera, and thinking about what I can do
about it. I’ve discovered a couple of
things that are helping me. Both of them have to do with being realistic about
the amount of time I have and the amount of time whatever I need to do is going
to take.
As I keep saying
in this blog, I plan my days first thing in the morning, figuring out what I’m
going to do when. Doing this in itself
has helped me enormously; I no longer feel rushed, harried, too busy, worried
about getting things done, etc., most of the time. But sometimes, inevitably, I get behind in
the plan, and those are the moments, I’ve noticed, when I start losing my harnessing
time serenity. My natural impulse when I
get behind is to rush to catch up. I think
that I still need to to get everything done in the time I have, the time I put
aside myself when I was making my plan – to try to cram everything I planned to
do into the now-shrinking time/space I have for it. Usually it’s not a rational thought – I
don’t have to get everything done
right then, I just think I do, because I decided earlier I would and now I sort
of feel like I’ll be failing if I don’t.
So I speed up to try to get everything done. To slow down, all I have to do is stop, look
at my plan for the day, and make a couple of small decisions: I can cross off some or all of the things I
no longer have time for, and/or I can plan to do those things at some point
later in the day or tomorrow or whenever.
Of course, you have to have a plan to do that. If you don’t plan your day, you may be in a
constant state of feeling like you have to cram more things than you can do
into not enough time to do them.
Sometimes I think that’s why we all feel so crazy busy these days – at
least one of the reasons. Or maybe it’s
not the reason we feel busy but an easy way to get rid of at least cut down on
the feeling. An easy way to slow down.
The other helpful
little thing I’ve noticed lately since I’ve been slowing down even more –
slowing down while still doing everything I have to do, slowing down by
changing my thoughts – is that sometimes all I have to do is figure out how
long things I have to do, actually do take.
One of my biggest
S.O.L. challenges is dealing with the cat boxes. S.O.L. stands for shit of life, a name my
friend and I came up with for all the annoying, time-consuming stuff you have
to do to keep your life running smoothly: paying bills, going to the bank,
unloading the dishwasher, getting your oil changed; none of those things is fun
but dealing with the cat boxes is the only one I can think of that literally
involves shit. I have two cats and four
cat boxes; I keep the cat boxes in the basement of my house. I scoop them out every few days and every
couple of weeks I empty them, wash them, and refill them, usually on Monday or
Tuesday, because the city picks up my trash on Wednesday morning. I don’t mind the scooping but I hate, hate,
hate the emptying, washing, etcetera. But
it has to be done (for obvious reasons too nasty to be mentionable here). It’s the price you pay when you have cats,
especially indoor cats; having indoor cats is the price you pay when you live
on a sort of busy street like I do and you’re so attached to your cats you
can’t handle the risk of them getting run over.
I dread dealing
with the cat boxes and I usually put it off.
Sometimes I put it off for days or even weeks. During all that time, I feel guilty -- not
non-stop, flat-out guilty the way you’d feel if you were, say, binging on
cookies all day long, but a little bit guilty nevertheless; guilty enough to
take up energy, guilty enough to be a kind of psychic work in itself. Guilty
on behalf of the cats as well myself, guilty for not doing anything about that
shit sitting down there in my basement. By
not cleaning out the cat boxes, I realized the other day, I’m actually
expanding, prolonging, the amount of time I spend on doing it. Because all the time I’m not doing it I’m
thinking about doing it, draining my energy a little bit by feeling guilty
about not doing it. (See Decision
Fatigue and Many Other Fatigues.)
So I decided, just
for the heck of it, to see how long it actually takes me to deal with the cat
boxes. And when I did I saw that the
entire task, from carrying the trash can down to the basement to taking the
trash can outside and emptying it into the larger outside trashcan – takes
about 25 minutes. Twenty-five minutes
isn’t very long; it’s not long enough to be worth days of minor suffering,
guilt, and avoidance. And did I mention
that during all that avoidance, I tell myself over and over – when the time
comes once again to clean the cat boxes -- that it’s going to take a long time
and a huge amount of energy to do it, and I have to put it off because I’m too
tired for it now -- ?
So it helps me to
know, now, that it only takes 25 minutes to deal with the cat boxes. I can find a 25-minute spot in my day – a
time when I’m likely to be fresh and full of energy and up for the task – and
when the time comes I can tell myself it’s just going to take 25 minutes, and
then I can just go down to the basement and do it. And then I can close the basement door behind
me, feeling like I’ve done my job, feeling like my cats are happy, feeling
happy myself, and maybe I can even lie down on my daybed and take a little nap
to reward myself.
-- Mary Allen
Mary,
ReplyDeleteI can think of a few family members under my roof under the age of twelve, to whom the duty has fallen, that I must refer to this post. I love the abbreviation and that it found its home in a 3d problem, since as writers we often get so metaphored away from reality. Hilarious post.