Sometimes I have so many things going on at the same time that I can hardly get anything done. I bounce around like ricochet rabbit from one thing to the next. It can be a little tiring and a bit frustrating when at the end of the day I am giving an account of myself and my activities to one of my harsher critics and hard-to-please taskmasters: me. Today has indeed been one of those days. I can say as I account for the various things I worked on over the course of the day that I did manage to accomplish some things; but I am feeling a sense of dissatisfaction at the end of this day. But here’s the good news: today is not yet over. It’s not so much about scrambling around to do yet more stuff so I can feel like I got something worthwhile done. It really is much more about how I choose to end this day. What am I going to do with this cranky disgruntlement? I’m going to do what I do every night around this time: offer thanks.
Gratitude is not just about feeling good or about doing things that ensure you’ll feel good later. As someone said to me recently, “It’s easy to be grateful when things are going well.” The corollary to that is, of course, that it takes a bit more effort to be truly grateful when things are difficult and challenging. I have certainly learned that over the course of these past months. But I remain grateful and willing to put in the work on remaining so, even in the midst of struggle and stress and chaos. It is about choice. So the first expression of gratitude is being grateful for what I got done today. When I could have sat around in bummed-out immobilization, I managed to get myself up and active–packing some boxes and taking them to the storage unit, reorganizing the stuff in the unit so that it was arranged a bit more securely (a few boxes had toppled since I’d last been in there), and accomplished other tasks in preparation for my someday relocation. I also did a little cleaning, prepared some application materials and other documents I had to complete, along with a few other odds and ends. So in spite of my protestations to the contrary, it has been a reasonably productive day.
Sometimes when one looks at the totality of what needs to be done, it can be overwhelming and progress can seem slow. It’s easy to overlook the fact that any action that moves you in the direction of your goal is to be appreciated rather than judged because it’s not moving you there fast enough. As I move forward with all that I have to do over the next month or so it’s important for me to encourage myself as best I can. It’s kind of like the line from “Finding Nemo” when the character Dory says, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…” At one point that was a mantra of mine, “just keep swimming,” even when everything around you is unfamiliar and scary, and you want to just stop and give up…just keep swimming, or in my case, just keep putting one foot in front of the other on those days when I’m struggling. If I just keep moving I eventually get to a place where I hit my stride and make more rapid progress. One key is for me to be much more patient with myself. I want everything to happen right now and get hard on myself when things aren’t happening fast enough. Now more than ever I have to be patient, compassionate, kind, and gentle with myself.
I am grateful for the progress I made on various projects today. Do I still have a lot of things to get done? Yes. But I have fewer things to do than I did when I woke this morning. This reminds me of the line from the Night Prayer I post in this blog from time to time:
“It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.”That’s pretty good advice. Let it be. Tonight I am going to accept with gratitude the work that I did today and let it be. I ran across this quote from Eckhart Tolle that now graces my wall of post-it note encouragements: “Sometimes letting go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.” How right that is. So I am exercising my power and letting go.
