Little Ideas, Big Impact
I’m up early this morning. Some sounds woke me up at 3:30. The house was dark, everyone was asleep. Solitude called me.
One of the minor inconveniences of our family’s ability to work from home is the lack of alone time. So I tossed and turned and tried to go back to sleep but in the end, I am up drinking coffee, thinking and writing.
I have a busy primate brain. I always have. I think. I strategize. I worry. I get overwhelmed. But lately, I’ve noticed a settling. A tight space in the center of my spine just loosened up.
And, instead of just relaxing into this new ease, my busy primate brain is curious. It has me wondering why. Sure, I’ve been working on my thoughts for a long time. Noticing thinking traps, reframing, accepting. And I mediate. It all helps. But here’s what I’ve come up with this morning: just two small ideas have had a huge impact on my anxiety and distractability.
The first small idea came to me from a dynamic mentor years ago. She showed me how to clear the clutter of “too much” by selecting two or three tasks that, if accomplished, would give that day purpose. That process of looking at the deep and tangled mess of life’s to dos is built into my daily routine. Most days I accomplish a lot more but most days I can end my day knowing I’ve tackled something that will move my life forward. Even on the hardest days.
The second small idea came from me. This year was a painful disaster. There were a lot of frightening things happening, the worst of which was losing my younger brother to a fast moving cancer. Even as I write this, I tear up. Grief has fused with my DNA. Hard times.
The thing that kept nagging at me through 2022 was how my attachment to story, to a beginning, middle, and end, was the wrong way for me to look at life. It was feeding my anxiety. Every step was too important because it could be leading to the wrong ending. Then I got the idea that we (I) had it all wrong. Fairy tales and tragedies need arcs and endings but real life is something different entirely. Real lives can only be represented by scatter plots. (Okay, bear with me for a moment. I’ve done a lot of statistics in my life. :)
When things are tough, I can focus on the good effort I am putting into that day. That’s it. No linear extrapolation. Just a dot of good effort on a scatter plot of life.
It’s so hard to explain that I wrote a short story about it. And the lovely magazine Soft Star published it. By the way, if you like speculative prose and poetry, Miranda Adkins is really pulling together a splendid publication. Consider subscribing to Soft Star Magazine.