What can I say, last year happened and didn’t happen, it flew past and it dragged by… it very much an “antonym” kind of a year. If you had asked me at the start of last year what was holding me back from certain projects and what was stopping me from moving forward in others, I would have said “time.” Well, turns out that isn’t quite the truth…
Honestly I can’t think how many times I have sorted through our entire house… decluttered a drawer a day, gone room by room and closet by closet, done a complete Marie Kondo… and yet there are always parts of our home that I don’t tackle. One shelf, one particular closet… in fact one corner of the garden. And if you had said to me, why don’t you finish that… I would have said: “If I just had one week without visitors, without interruptions, without activities, without distractions… then I could get it done.” Actually, that is not the case at all.
Last year we had so much time, no distractions, no visitors… though I do think I might have spent an entire year prepping, feeding and cleaning-up-from-feeding my gang. Those few corners of our home remain… clutterful. It turns out that just as you were not going to organise your entire home before the holidays, calling it a New Year is probably not going to do the trick either… it turns out that we leave these little road blocks out to trip ourselves.
These little roadblocks, are the things that hold us back… I can’t start our school year until I have sorted the papers, I can’t start the veg garden because I still have to deal with that closet, I can’t start working out until I find gym clothes that fit me. We hold ourselves ransom from doing the things we really want to do, by holding onto the things that we never want to deal with.
Firstly, any project that you are putting off until “insert anything you can’t face doing on the home front” is really worth doing first. The closet looks just the same as ever… but we did create a vegi-garden during lockdown and it sparked such joy… certainly pottering around in the garden brought a whole new level of enjoying the home we live in.
Secondly, consider the projects that are holding you back… are they really so enormous? Could you not tackle them piece by piece in fifteen minute time slots. I put off sorting the kids’ book case the whole year, because I thought it would take weeks. Well, I sorted it out and tidied it up and donated two boxes of books in literally fifteen minutes.
And as a reward: Get moving, get some easy exercise, even gentle exercise releases endorphins and you need those. Turns out I have managed to exercise every day of lock down, despite not having perfectly fitting athletic apparel, I am a moderate athlete… I do moderate exercise (loads of it, I need all the endorphins I can get, to get several teenagers through a pandemic). I am not a super elite athlete who needs precision gear to take the dog for a jog around the block… yeah… tights that didn’t slide all over and a comfortable, functioning sports bra would be fabulous… but those are details that needn’t hold us back.
I am just going to suggest that you take a careful look at the projects that you really want to do… look at that what’s holding you back… “UNTIL” that closet is cleaned out… I can honestly say that in our house, no one cares about that closet… but everyone has enjoyed vegetables fresh from the garden.