Hydrangeas, Humility, Letting go.

 The hydrangeas near my sit spot have been slowly blooming more and more. Now they are so numerous and big the bush is drooping. makes me think of that saying, how does it go, something like, "the tree with the most fruit bows the lowest." Gratitude for the abundance of beauty and the ever-changing art-show nature puts on for us all. And the gardener who planted these flowering perennials. And the birdsong and a hundred other things that fill me with joy and awe each morning I go out to sit in nature for a few minutes.

I continue to not be able to get very much ahead of things. I am making progress, but even on break, there is just so much trying to fill in all the gaps, new and urgent tasks that crop up and take my time and energy, it is rare I get a lot of backlog things done on a given day. I am making steady progress though. I finally uploaded all the pictures from my old-school digital camera to my computer (I should share some of those here at some point. Good pictures from my travels and such). I finally got an appointment with a legal person to go over wills and living wills and power of attorneys and such, which I'd been meaning to do for many years now. I went over my apple notes and transferred over the important ones I wanted in one place. I did a massive more-than-weekly review with all the backlogged stuff. I got rid of my backlogged emails, so I'm now dancing around a clear email inbox.

Though I am realizing the intelligence of a suggestion I read, in terms of organizing notes, and email inboxes and such. The suggestion was just to take the whole big long backlog, and archive it all, sight unseen. If you really need to, go back a month or two or however long you feel comfortable with, if you really think there's something important in there and go through each one, but otherwise, just get it archived, out of sight, out of mind. The value gained by hand-picking through all those old emails is miniscule, and the time taken to do so is immense. If you realize you really need something, you've got the archived box/folder, and especially with digital things, there's little cost to keep it, often you can find things easily with a search, and even if not, it's usually still less time, searching through your archived folder for a single thing, than all the time it takes to process each thing.

This principle, what I'm calling the "just archive it" mentality, is something I'm trying to figure out how to implement in more of my life. I think there are numerous situations where it applies, though with physical stuff, there is the issue of running out of physical room. It's not as close to free as with digital files. Still, there is a low-effort approach to sorting and organizing, that gets unused things out of the way quickly, leaving me time for more important things. That is the approach I want to be taking with more things.

I'm thinking about how I can't make more hours in the day, so my only way to 'manage' my time, is to choose my priorities, what I spend time on, more carefully. This can be challenging, as often there is a strong urge just to complete something, to have the open loop closed. But that thing is really not worth putting that time into, so it is a struggle of willpower to decide to just let it go.

I'm enjoying playing more during my break as well, spending time with Suzannah. We're building a lego treehouse together. It's super fun. Kinda like doing a puzzle together, but 3-dimensional.

OK, I've got a bunch of posts to catch up on still, and a haircut to get to in a bit, so that's all for this post. I should share a picture of our treehouse in it's mid-construction state.

With love,

Isaac