2nd degree quote

I've got several posts to make up. I don't even remember how many, at least two, maybe going on three, so this first one is just going to be a quote I got in a weekly email from James Clear. The quote is by Cheryl Strayed. Says something I know but sometimes forget, and says it in a articulate way:

"Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs.

I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do—have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always.

As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do."

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things

A quick post about time

I'm a week behind again, and running out of time today as well, so I'm going to try for a haiku-esk brevity for this post.

One of the hardest things is when you are trying to do something difficult, new, and you fail at it, yet again, and you try to keep from getting discouraged and despondent, because you know that will only make it harder and life less enjoyable.

I'm trying to get better, trying to get really good, at time management and prioritization and organization. And I'm not very good at it yet. And I've been trying to get better at it for a while, and I keep making the same or similar mistakes. Forgetting to stick to my plan, getting side-tracked down little task-rabbit-holes that are compelling and urge me to finish them, even though they are largely irrelevant.

I've been thinking about what several people have said about goal pruning. The idea being you have to prune your ideas like a rose bush. You only have so much energy and time, not enough to do everything, so it behooves one to spend that energy and time where it is most valuable. What "valuable" means to each of us will be different, but the principal remains. And so, if you want to do things well, you need to accept not doing, or doing very poorly, other things.

At some point it would also be good to take an inventory of exactly how much time each of the things i'm doing is taking up, because there may be a few time hogs that are taking a lot of time, but are only medium importance. That would be good to know, because I could then cut those things, or set a time limit to them.

In any case, I know getting discouraged about failures is counter productive, but after the umpteenth failure, it is sometimes challenging to maintain positivity, hope, buoyancy, enthusiasm, in the face of it. Regardless, it needs to be done, but it's something that I still find challenging.

I'm excited about Christmas break, coming up next week!!! Though I'm going to try and spend more of it actually taking a break than I did with Thanksgiving, which I think will be good for me, but also just makes the despairing part of me that can't seem to get the time managment thing to work, despair more that I'll never have time to get on top of things. I think I have to let go a bit on my attachment to having myself organized and together. Some say the process of enlightenment is a process of step by step giving up attachments, so perhaps this is just one more attachment that needs to be let go of.