For the last month, I’ve been skipping over the top item on my work task list. While I won’t apologize for my undone work (one of the benefits of being self-employed), I would like to share my story about what I’m doing instead.
My ignored task? “2024 reflection/2025 planning.”
In past years, I’ve welcomed this task. I’ve made reflection and planning into a comfortable ritual. I mindfully sit with what I see as I look back on my calendar and forecast ahead. I bring curiosity to the past and future. I celebrate, I learn, I dream, and I strategize.
This process taps into my heart and allows my deep-thinking mind to have free rein for a bit. A sensitive idealist’s dream.
Except it’s not happening for me the same way this year.
My mind, my heart, my body, my spirit are all resisting this process. Any small steps I’ve taken have felt like running a marathon with no training. It’s exhausting, unfulfilling, and work in the worst sense of the word.
I’ve decided to be a better boss to myself and suspend this task for now. I’m giving myself permission to play instead. I’m allowing myself to rest. And I’m focusing only on the tasks in front of me, planned by a me last year who apparently was up for the job. I’m grateful for her foresight!
Knowing my love of reminiscing and planning, it seems likely that I’ll come back to this unfinished business. But today, I crossed it off my to do list. It may be a task for the spring equinox, or when the fall harvest arrives, or maybe next year at this time. However, I am no longer holding myself accountable for this task this January.
And so, with my time for reflection and planning this morning suddenly unallotted, I moved my body. I stirred a pot of soup and stared into the steam. I listened to the neighborhood birds feeding in my back yard, watched them fluff up to fend off the single-digit temperatures. Then thought to record a bit of video to share with you.
Secretly, I was hoping that I’d have some brilliant insight to kickstart my reflection and planning process. That’s often how it happens when I take my mind off duty and allow myself to engage in other areas of life.
Not today.
And I’m okay with that. Really. I know that my life is lived in these day-to-day moments.
I need only to live them, one at a time.
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