I’m in regrouping mode right now. A LOT of stuff slid down the priority list this past year. Projects that didn’t get enough forward motion, deadlines that slipped, plans that got de-verbed and stale, and operational stuff (chop wood, carry water) that just got ignored.
My office is awash in files, the garage is full of stuff from my parent’s house, the side yard is full of big mature weeds taller than the neighbor kid we hired to pull them.
I’m working hard to extend myself a lot of grace. After all, I spent a couple of months away from home this year – during the most productive gardening times no less – dealing with family things, burning through my vacation time, and just struggling to stay on top of everything. I’m emotionally exhausted. And despite that, and with my husband’s help, we managed to accomplish some of our goals for ourselves and the peaceable kingdom. Operation “have a fucking social life” is going amazingly well (and a big thank you to everyone who has come by to hang out, checked in on me when I was in the desert, and just generally been lovely). Our protein sustainability goal is proceeding to plan. My membership has been getting their regular updates. So, I’ll take the wins here along with the difficult times.
Because this is life — full of upset and chaos and changes that throw your plans off. And when it happens, the thing you don’t want to do is give up or beat yourself up. Instead, try to hone your focus onto the most important things for you now. One method that I find useful in this sort of situation is to pick a window of time and identify your top three things to focus on. These might be hard goals, but they could also just be areas you want to reset your attention to.
My window of time is through the end of the year. My top three include:
- Dealing with the mass of paperwork and stuff that the sale of my parent’s house put into mine. This doesn’t mean I have to get rid of it all, but it does mean it needs to not be EVERYWHERE. This isn’t a goal or a task by the way, it’s a focus area which will spawn it’s own set of much smaller goals/projects/tasks to actually accomplish. For example, emptying the old filing cabinet and sticking it into my office closet to be filled with all those endless files… that’s a mini project I started the other day and will finish just as soon as I finish this post. Selling the bedroom set required posting a listing and then fielding low ball offers until someone comes along who truly loves it. Selling other things might require time (as well as preconceived notions about value) but also keeping them organized until they sell. There’s some furniture rearranging that I need some additional muscle for. And so on.
- Stay-cationing hard. I desperately need a break, but no real, official break is going to be forthcoming this year. So instead, I will make the coming months as peaceful and soothing as I possibly can. That means keeping the holidays simple and doing things that nurture my spirit… allowing myself to relax and decompress and, frankly, heal and grieve. That’s as important for me right now as any practical project and so I need to give it the attention it deserves. Because it’s easy to focus only on the ‘stuff’ that needs to get done and not on making space for the feelings that I need to allow myself to feel
- Create more. This is a big one for me. The kind of emotional exhaustion I’ve been feeling has really sapped my energy for creating things. The trick with this one is that, because creating anything has been hard, I’m not going to limit myself in what I want to create. Now is not the time to push limits, it’s the time to reset my baseline. It’s OK to create things in areas that I’m already comfortable with, just to get those juices flowing again.
So those are my top three for the next three months. And I’m looking forward to giving myself the time, space, and permission to focus in those areas. And if I can, I know that I’ll end the year more refreshed and with more space and emotional peace to take on the coming year.
