There’s a robin who has spent the better part of a month courting his own reflection by jumping at our back windows, and I feel for him: his project is not going to go according to plan. He did the same thing last spring and, apart from making a real mess of our windows, I expect he’s quite disappointed in the results he’s been able to produce. Same here, Mr. Robin. Same here.
Spring is in full swing now, I’d say, at least based on the warmer, longer, sunnier days, and my antihistamine use. Spring is a riot: a mania of weather and daylight and growth and flowers and pollen and expectations. My sinuses and my projects feel stuffed up and stuck.
These days, when people ask what I’m allergic to, I just wave my hand vaguely around me at everything in my general vicinity. If it’s green and it grows, I’m willing to bet it makes my throat itch and gives me contact dermatitis. Apparently I’m also allergic to my to-do list, as well. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just allergic to spring itself. It’s all too much: too much pollen and too much to do.
I think this is at least part of why spring has never been my favourite season, though I know it is for so many other people. I get it, especially for those who struggle with the dark and cold bareness of winter. Spring would be a beacon of hope after a long, stormy night. I personally love fall and winter so much, relishing in the cosy comfort and rest that those seasons inspire, though I will admit that spring has grown on me, thanks to having a garden to putter around in.
Maybe, as I grow older, I am learning to appreciate my current moment, which is something this driven person has traditionally struggled with. When I was younger, spring felt like an annoying prelude to Summer, which is when all the fun happened. Spring was a mucky delay of unreliable weather, and it just felt like such a huge transition that I disregarded it, preferring the certainty of the seasons surrounding it. Winter and Summer are not vague: they know who they are and they show up wholeheartedly.
This particular spring, besides my hay fever, I find myself struggling with my focus and productivity. Now, while I’m sure I enjoy residence somewhere on the ADHD spectrum, I don’t generally struggle with getting things done the way I have been of late.
You guys, I am feeling BEHIND. I can’t seem to catch up, all of a sudden. Right now, I have so many things on the go and they all need my attention, and I swear they weren’t urgent a month or two ago (I suppose that month or two might be a clue to the current sense of urgency…).
It’s almost rude, the way that yard work has reinserted itself into our needs-attention list, with everything growing and vying for attention and none of it waiting its own turn. It needs attention and it needs it NOW.
This is ALL of my projects lately, it seems. We’re just over a month into spring and I’m already falling behind on my spring projects, which has trickle-down impacts for the rest of my year’s plan, and certainly creates anxiety when I look down the barrel of the coming months.
I can’t seem to catch up, no matter how much space I have available to work on my list, because as soon as I start in on one task, three others that are equally critical pull my attention. Sometimes, as I sit down to work on whichever item I’m trying to move forward, I realize that I’ve missed steps and I need to not just slow down, but back up, even. The result? I’m not feeling present in the moment, unless that moment is pure stress and anxiety. That I’m present too.
Suddenly, it feels like I’m just hurtling through Time backwards, playing catch up with things always just out of reach. For each Thing That Needs Attention, there is a list of prerequisites that I’ve failed to meet. Crossing things off the list feels like a rare bird, and even when it happens, it’s overshadowed by the fact that I’m not caught up to where I want to be now; I’m just barely catching up to where I should have been some time ago.
Ugh. It’s that should that gets me.
Those shoulds get me every time. Sigh. Whether or not there’s somewhere I should be, the fact is that I am where I am, instead. The should adds guilt (“I messed up”) and shame (“I AM messed up”), and I can attest to the fact that those two ingredients no longer inspire the best version of me to show up. To be honest, I don’t know that they ever did, but I used to merrily burn guilt and shame to fuel my achievements, which I mistakenly believed were the best parts of me and made me lovable.
These days, thankfully, I’m not so liable to let guilt and shame run my daily program, but I’ll own that when I think of All The Things That Need My Attention, anxiety starts to creep into the waves of my overwhelm cycle, and I can already feel myself losing trust in me. I can feel resignation seeping into the edges of my plans and projects and goals, as weeks and weekend pass without me checking off the things I wanted to accomplish.
I’m frustrated with myself and with anything that gets in my way, even if it’s something I want to do. Things that keep getting pushed, like my veggie garden, start to become unlikely to take root, given that nothing will grow if those seeds don’t get planted. But before I can plant them, I need to turn the earth, adding new soil and setting the bed up to be a good place for those seeds to grow. Wait, do I even have enough soil? Should I swap my wooden beds for metal? And didn’t I want to build trellises this year? And around and around I go, adding to my list instead of checking things off of it.
It’s worth checking to see if the things on my list are actually still important to me. The world is insane and a victory garden seems like a good idea. Carving out time to dig around in my garden might not be a top priority for me right now, but I do enjoy watching my garden produce veggies, and I do like to eat them later on.
Yes, my veggie garden happens to be a perfect a metaphor, but it is also actually a literal item on my to-do list for months, when I missed the opportunity to start my seedlings indoors. How it’s going with my erstwhile garden beds is how it’s going with all my projects, and I’m getting tired of it.
Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way, and nor is it necessarily only something I experience in springtime, either. But it is a pattern that I desperately want to change, because I don’t enjoy the experience of life it creates, and the experience of myself I have inside of it.
Here’s the awkward part: I even know how to change this. I literally teach people how to do this for a living. While this could make me feel like a hypocrite and imposter (which it sometimes does), I also know that part of why I can support other people to change this cycle is because I really, really get it, and not just in an academic sense. I understand what it’s like to be bewildered by an unwillingness and seeming inability to just. Do. The. Freaking. Thing. Already.
I think this is more common than we think. Whatever goals and plans survive January’s New Year’s resolution fail rate bump up against the merry madness of March, when life seems to go from zero to a hundred in about 3 seconds flat. Suddenly, we’re flailing and needing to make summer plans and how are all of our evenings filled up all at once and why is September just five minutes away?
Now, I think that following the natural cycles of the seasons are a great idea for all of us fauna, and it’s something I’m integrating deeply into my own life and work. But, if we follow Nature’s lead, we need to recalibrate ourselves, and pay greater attention to harnessing the seasonal energy appropriately. After winter’s rest and recovery, we sort of wake up in a blind panic of productivity when spring arrives with all her promise of new life and fresh shoots and ALL THAT POSSIBILITY. It’s mayhem, and so we join the madness.
After taking space to slow down during the colder, darker months, we want to leap into action, full of excitement to move everything forward. But if you, like me, are finding yourself struggling to focus and not get swept away by the competing demands and opportunities that are tumbling into your life, just know you’re not alone. Leaping into action after a time of less activity usually results in being sidelined by a pulled hamstring. We need to calm down and go in gently, warming up, making sure we’re ready to take steps that will add up to grand leaps.
It reminds me of my favourite words from Aldous Huxley, who must’ve been a driven person just like me, to know my experience so precisely:
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”
― Aldous Huxley
One thing that has helped me to get out of the dark quicksands of overwhelm is to slow down significantly, which feels counterintuitive. Just like going still in quicksand would be so hard in the moment you feel yourself sinking, it’s the panicked flailing that will sink me faster than going still.
Panicking doesn’t generally lead me to making good or strategic decisions. As the saying goes, “measure twice to cut once”. This means slowing down, and getting clear on what I’m doing and what is needed, rather than the frenetic start-stopping I’ve been caught in lately.
Why panic, Bay? What’s so scary about spring and your to-do list? Well, let me tell you: your survival mechanism (and mine), which works with your fear, wants you to give up and stop, because your survival mechanism believes all forward movement is a threat to your very existence.
So your fear wants to keep you safe by keeping you still, keeping you stuck. And a great way to get you stuck is to get you leaping about in all directions at once, totally overwhelming you until you give up. Your fear doesn’t care how you fare emotionally or spiritually in that stuck still rut, because while you’re in that rut, at least you’re alive and safe: safe from failure, safe from the unknown. Even your frustration is safe for your fear, because it is familiar, and we all prefer a familiar hell to an unfamiliar heaven.
Your fear and mine confuse surviving with safety, and call that a life. But merely being alive is not the same as a life, or at least not the life you desire to be living.
Going slow, which feels like the very opposite of what I need to do right now, is how I will move forward with intention. Making a list of all the things that need my attention might feel overwhelming, but I know it’s better to have it down on paper than swirling around in my head.
Triaging my projects and tasks and then prioritizing the actions required is the magic solution to the problem I’m experiencing, as long as I make sure to create the structure needed to actually take the required action.
Things will not go better because I create more stress for myself. We don’t get medals for unnecessary suffering. Just because transitions have been stressful to my nervous system doesn’t mean it has to keep going that way. If I want to enjoy this season I’m in, I need to slow down, figure out how I want it to go, and then create that, with intention.
Lightly child, lightly.
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