Yesterday was a busy day.
So was the day before.
And the day before that.
Life has been piling up. Mostly it’s been good things. It’s been me taking steps in the direction of my goals. It’s been me investing in my family and my community. It’s also taking care of my ailing cat (who is completely recovered now, by the way!). And unexpectedly having to take my car to the garage. It’s been a lot. And, somehow, there always seems to be more. One more thing I must do today, this week, this lifetime—just so that everything will turn out the way I want it to. Do you hear God laughing at me right now? Yeah, me too.
I still have several things on my to-do list for this week, but I know I’m not going to get to all of them, so I am making accommodations. For one thing, this was not the blog post I had planned for this week. I was going to make a video and write about making art every day. I was excited about it, but it’s too much. A part of me says, Hey, just push through. It’s just one more thing. Pour another cup of coffee. You can do it! And that part of me is right. I probably could do it, but at the cost of becoming more energy indebted and less, well, me. Does that make sense? Have you noticed that when you overextend yourself for too long that you turn into an ugly, ungrateful, wretched, slobbering monster?
Or is that just me?
Anyway, the biggest problem with my monster is that she invariably makes things worse. Every little molehill becomes Mt. Everest. Every tiny slight becomes a gaping wound. Every mistake becomes life-threatening. This attitude perpetuates a cycle of unhappiness and, ultimately, under-productiveness.
A few months ago I read a blog post on Kris Carr’s website titled The Myth of Finding Your Purpose. She says it’s her most popular post of all time and I can understand why. In it, she begs the question, “What if finding your purpose is about . . . nurturing yourself?” At first, I felt a little perplexed by this. How can that be a purpose? Isn’t that just something that happens when you pursue and achieve your true calling(s)? But when I thought about it, I realized that my callings—literally, the things that call to me—are simply things I do in service to my purpose. And my purpose is to be the best—the healthiest and happiest and kindest—version possible of this particular conglomeration of cells and spirit that my parents happened to name Diana. My purpose is to spend as little time in the monster skin as possible.
So today, I am taking a nice and easy day. Not a vacation day. Not a sick day. I thought about both of these options. I thought about not blogging, but I realized this is one of the things I do that feeds my spirit, and I didn’t want to rob myself of that. A nice and easy day means being honest with myself about what I can and cannot accomplish. It means not expecting too much. It means reminding myself that even though all those things on my list seem imperative, probably none of them are actually life and death It means going slowly, taking the most important thing first, and letting it take however long it takes. It means remembering to breathe, to release my shoulders from their defensive stance next to my ears, and to enjoy the sunshine flowing through the window.
I now have several exciting sheets of congratulatory stickers (like the ones used by kindergarten teachers) and, as I record the events of the day in my journal, I think of at least one thing I accomplished, write it down, and I plop one of those stickers down next to it. Sometimes it’s for doing something I was scared to do—like expressing myself honestly even though I feared retribution. But the bar is not always that high. Sometimes I give myself a gold star for vacuuming. Sometimes it’s for self-care, like say, napping. You’re laughing right now. I get it, but the truth is that if you’re like me, you do a whole bunch of things during any given day for which you give yourself no credit, whatsoever. Why? Because “You’re supposed to have done that. You don’t get a gold star for brushing your teeth, or feeding your family, or hugging your kids when you’re an adult. That’s ridiculous.” 
I agree, one hundred percent—but ONLY, if you are asking for that gold star from someone else. I can’t expect other people to get excited about my taking good care of myself. I can’t expect them to reward me. But when I acknowledge to myself the things that I am doing—even the stuff that I “should” be doing as a matter of course—I shift my self-attitude from a person who’s failing all the time, to someone who could maybe do some things better, but who is also doing a heck of a lot of things absolutely right. And that chick, definitely has more energy than Perpetually Failing Woman. Plus, she’s a lot more fun to be around.
My mother and I are walking together this morning. It’s already apparent that it’s a tough one for both of us, but we still do our daily check-ins. “My legs are hurting a lot,” she tells me. She knows that the pain in my legs have been a merciless for several days now, so she adds, “Maybe your legs said something to mine, and it spread.”
In light of this, my new motto is: Start small—and then keep going small until you get whatever the thing is you need to do done. It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, but, when I think about it, it is pretty much how I made it through college. When completely cowed by the mountain of writing I needed to do and the soul-crushing fear of not being able to do it, I would start by opening a document, forcing myself to add one sentence (more if I could) and then, moving to the next paper, do the same. I would rotate through all of my current projects in this fashion. Write a line, switch, write a line, switch. After I had a draft down, I could go back and check for cogency and fix any problems, but it was getting that first layer down that was the biggest challenge—which I overcame only by taking it piece by piece, sentence by sentence. I still write this way when I am stuck. I ask myself, What’s the next line? I don’t think about what will come after. I only have to write one sentence. And once that’s done. I do it again.
There is an alternative. Start small. Do the thing you can do—this is advice I have given myself regularly over the past 20 years (when I haven’t been busy trying to outsmart myself). If you can meditate for two minutes a day, then meditate for two minutes a day. If you can eat more vegetables, but can’t eat less sugar, than eat more vegetables and don’t eat less sugar. And, *this is key*, don’t let your mind sell you a bill of goods that you are somehow falling short! The saying A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step is, perhaps, a cliché, and, of course, you do have to take all the succeeding steps after that first one if you want to get to your destination, but if you tell yourself that that first step is not, won’t ever be, enough, you will never take the second.
Diana Klein 