One and done

Posted On February 16, 2024

Day 3! I’m so pleased to actually find myself here, writing. I actually felt a bit convicted earlier today when I heard some very sound advice from a fellow homemaker who I follow online. She said she has a dreamy nature, and so she’s had to integrate some ideas for how to focus her work and time in order to counteract the unwanted consequences of such an orientation. Oh my. So much of what she said felt relevant to me. The one that stuck out to me the most was to activate the principle of “one and done”. Upon googling, this yielded a lot of funny-to-me definitions. How many children to have, a person who only plays one season in a given sport, a one night stand, a monogamous partnership, etc. But the one she was referring to was about how to manage your emails. Basically, don’t look at an email and say to yourself “I’ll reply later”, just do it right then. So simple, and so wise.

She said this philosophy has spilled over into everything she does in her life. I was stunned. I consider myself a do-er, and yet, I walk by the same jobs over and over and think “ah, should put that one on the list”, when in all honestly I could just do the thing in a fraction of the time and have no list to deal with. So essentially that kind of thinking breeds new tasks and creates inevitable overwhelm. I walk by job after job, do some but not all, get overwhelmed, make a list, get more overwhelmed, then sit and play a game on my phone for a while to distract myself from feeling overwhelmed… Such a game changer, to just pause and ask myself why I can’t do it right now, and then if I can, do. Sometimes something simple like that just whacks me over the head, in the best way. I’m hoping to carry forward the “one and done” home/farm philosophy for a few days and see what happens.

And as the day has worn on and I realized I wanted to write something to keep up on my personal Lenten commitment, I realized I can apply both the just-do-it-now philosophy as well as the practice of releasing perfectionism. But what if I don’t have anything good or useful to say? What if I only have a few minutes? I still have to make dinner and spend time with the kids and all of it… All of this is the emotional equivalent of noticing, then making a mental list to put off the doing. I know that so much of writing is about just sitting down and allowing something to happen, about just being open. So it’s good for me early on in this little challenge to articulate to myself that the *showing up* is the main point of this exercise. I can almost always do that.