It's funny how often the nature of being human can also be a paradox.
On one hand, one of my strengths is my ability to deal with and work through seemingly overwhelming projects; on the other hand one of my weaknesses is that I tend to get hopelessly overwhelmed and stuck when faced with an overwhelming project!
Doesn't make much sense, does it?
Of course the primary side effect of feeling overwhelmed is endless procrastination into engaging in a hive of activity that makes me feel like I'm extraordinarily busy while not actually addressing any of the things I really need to get done.
Sorting my “nightmare closet” at the back of my home office is one of my overwhelming projects. Redesigning and reworking part of the sideyard for food production is also an overwhelming project. Taking my approximately 20 year accumulation a fairly random ”leftovers” from purchases for my stamp business and putting them all on eBay and selling them is an overwhelming project. Annual bookkeeping and accounting for six home based businesses is an overwhelming project.
I have lots of good advice to myself, along with clever sayings like “the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time” (not that I would ever eat an elephant, no worries!) but they don't really do me a lot of good.
The last overwhelming project I faced I took on last winter and early spring when I removed eight years’ worth of intense tangled blackberry vines from what was going to become our vegetable garden. The thorny vines had overgrown the side of the garage and the side of the house and had basically become a 40 by 40 foot impenetrable wilderness.
The end result is what is now phase one of our beautiful vegetable garden, where we sit under the Apple trees and enjoy afternoon coffee and an opportunity to just zone out and forget about the stress of ”Huge Projects We Have To Get Done.”
The garden serves as an important reminder that I do have the capacity to take on and get really large boring problems done, but it's also a reminder of the positive feelings I have in knowing that something is done and no longer needs to be done.
I suppose it helps to some degree that I am blessed from nature's side with a fairly substantial amount of patience, as well as a tendency to become easily ”resigned to my fate...” so once I get into one of these things I just keep moseying on forward with zero expectation or requirement that my time — for a long time — will be given over to anything other than sheer well-to-wall drudgery!
Of course there are many who would argue that we need to find purpose and meaning in what we're doing, but the only purpose and meaning I've ever been able to find in determination tests like these is the ”purpose” of getting the damn thing done so I can once again sit down and engage in my favorite pastime of doing pretty much nothing at all!
And so, I sit here and contemplate the process of getting started on the side yard, then using my evenings to continue sorting my closet… undertaking both with the knowledge that it'll take several months to get from point A to point B, and while I'm in the middle of doing these things I won't be particularly useful to take care of other things.
And maybe that's part of the problem many of us face. We live in a time and age where we're often engaged in so many things that when we take on a new major project — like working three months on a garden project — all those other things we can barely keep up with to start with, all start piling up and by the time we're done with one project, one of the things we previously had somewhat under control has in the meantime turned into an overwhelmingly large project!
Now, I could easily get into extensive editorializing and waxing philosophical about life in the 21st century; wage slavery and taxation, and the eternally growing gap between the haves and the have nots, but I'll refrain from that since that requires an entirely separate post!
Suffice it to say that perhaps the real task at hand for a lot of people is to sit down and simply evaluate what it is we take into our lives and agree to be part of, in the first place. Do we really need all these activities?
And what would it take to simply give them up?
Thanks for reading and have a great remainder of your week!
How about YOU? How well do you deal with life's "overwhelmingly large projects?" And particularly, while you all have everything else to deal with? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210519 23:59 PDT
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I get it. I have too many projects on the go all the time. I like accomplishing things and I tend to be ambitious about how much I can do in a single day. At least I am doing things that I want to do.
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