Sometimes Life Becomes Too Big...

Maybe we all have this experience at one time or another. Maybe we don't...

That's all part of the great mystery, isn't it? We can sort of guess what other people are experiencing but unless we're actually able to sit inside their bodies we don't really know.

The Climbing of Psychological Mountains

I am sitting in my home office, looking out across the jumble of boxes and folders and bins and stacks of paper and other stuff piled up on tables and shelves... all of it in some way representing three different home-based businesses I call "my work," as well as my online writing and editing business.

I look at it, and it all feels like it is much larger than I am. What sort of nut would take on that much, and think they had even a remote chance of keeping up with it. Periodically, I am gripped by this desire to just take it all, throw it in a dumpster outside, set it on fire and walk away.

It's silly really. After all, I really like the things I do but perhaps what frustrates me about it is the frequency with which it feels like a never-ending Death March through an uncertain landscape with no guarantee whatsoever that there's a reward on the other side.

Somebody once served me up the rather poignant truism that "the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time."

Of course I don't eat elephants and I don't recommend that anybody do, however it's a poignant metaphor for the fact that no matter how large a task may seem what you ultimately have to do is just begin. And sometimes that step you need to take to begin is actually the hardest even though there is lots of work ahead of you... far ahead of you.

Procrastinating... Again...

I wrote about the mysteries of procrastination a couple of weeks back, and one of the things I learned from doing rather extensive study on procrastination is the fact that the hardest thing for a procrastinator isn't completing a task but getting started on it.

That particular snippet was specifically offered up to illustrate that most procrastinators aren't actually lazy, they just lack a certain kind of motivation to get past their inertia.

Shoulding on Myself

Often, we tell ourselves that we should be doing something other than what we're actually doing. I suffer a bit from that disease as well, although in my case I mostly look at what's ahead of me and realize that doing item A means not doing item B... but both item A and item B need to be done.

Some people are working all the time and are Energizer Bunnies (by nature) as well but I'm certainly not one of those. I look at the reality that I have about 15,000 items I need to list on eBay and that there are simply not enough hours and days in the year for me to accomplish that in a timely fashion. Unless, of course, I — like the aforementioned elephant — break all that into smaller parts.

Breaking Free

And that's often what happens to us when we get stuck. The task ahead of us seems insurmountable and impossible. And so we get stuck, overwhelmed by what is immediately in front of us, unable to take a step back and parcel the task into smaller bits.

Several decades ago — when I was still living in Texas — my neighbor and I determined that we needed to shore up the lower edge of our yards where they backed up on a creek that would get very swift and almost violent during heavy rains, so we'd lose a bit more back yard. We made the decision that we needed to build a rock retaining wall along about a 200-foot stretch of water.

My neighbor, being a lifelong resident of the area, had connections all over the place and he also had connections to a contractor who was currently blasting a gap through a limestone ridge to put a road there.

And wouldn't you know it? About a week later we had 23 of those big dual axle dump truck loads of broken up limestone dumped on the side lawn between our houses. It was probably on the order of about 500 tons and we needed to move it all by hand from the side lawn to the edge of the creek to build this rock retaining wall.

I say "by hand" because my neighbor had already put his tractor in 6 feet of water and mud, and almost a rented backhoe trying to pull the tractor out... the edge was soft and ready to fall.

Again, this was a task that seemed completely insurmountable. I mean two guys with dollies and wheelbarrows and crowbars moving 1,000,000 pounds of rock? That's insane! But in due course we did complete the task over a period of about 18 months... and according to the Google satellite view of the area, that rock wall still stands, 25 years later!

So, I look at all the boxes and bins and stuff in my office — all of which contain what essentially amounts to inventory that has to be sold — and I recognize that I'm looking at "23 dump truck loads of limestone," except in a slightly different format. The task seems much bigger than I am but I just have to start at one corner and keep going and have faith in the fact that even if it's going to go slower than I expected, it will eventually all get done.

In small bits, not big ones...

Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT posted anywhere else!)
Created at 2024-01-04 17:36 PST
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