April 25, 2009

Three a Day

Yesterday on the way to the post office I was ruing my long To-Do list, populated with items I'm not interested in, some of them dating back a few weeks, or perhaps even a month; one or two actually go all the way back to Christmas week. None of them can be expunged. I just have to do them. But how without betraying my own rule of moving within the moment; of choosing to do that to which I'm led? (Not everybody can follow this rule. Children in the house rather preclude it. Also, if you're not deadline-motivated -- which I am -- it can lead to disaster.

Yesterday, though, I decided to try an experiment. For the next howeverlong, I'm going to do three things a day that I don't want to do.

My intent? To bring myself back into harmony by eliminating the cobwebby details clunking up my brain.

I'm hoping this will be a limited engagement, that in short order I'll either have swept down all the cobwebs; or that I'll come to a rapprochement with life and no longer assign judgments to tasks that need done but will simply do them immediately, thus removing them to the state of inconsequence they warrant.

I'm moved in part by an e-mail from my friend Nicole who had open heart surgery one month ago yesterday and was gloating because the doctor had just told her she can now drive AND VACUUM. "I never thought I'd miss vacuuming," she said.

It's the vacuuming, but it's also the normalcy I imagine she was missing. And that's what I'm after: regarding boring, repetitive, inconsequential tasks as normalcy; and thereby creating in them an invisibility that will allow for increased tranquility in my own life.

Do you think it will work? If so, might you try something similar? Or perhaps the inverse is true for you; that you do the required tedious stultifying items on your list and somehow never quite get to the fun part. If so, might you try the opposite, and make yourself do three fun things a day?

(Here's a dastardly thought: I find the idea of doing three fun things a day harder than the idea of doing three things I don't want to do. What's up with that?

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