Stillness 8-4: When we’re stressed, often it’s because we don’t believe we have enough time to do everything that needs to be done. Maybe we’re overwhelmed by too many emails that must be responded to, or a list of chores to get through, or a day that’s packed with errands and no time to rest,
Here’s a way you’ll always find you have enough time to accomplish everything you have to, gracefully, lightly, cheerfully:
Carve time into your life, just as you carve space into it. Create individual “rooms” for each of your tasks. Imagine that you’re going into the respond-to-emails-room for one hour—say it’s the room from 9 to 10 am. Imagine that’s all you can do in that room—nothing else. It’s not the mopping-the-kitchen-floor-room or the taking-a-walk room.
Then from 11-12 you can go into your yoga-room and focus on that. From 2 to 3 can be your resting-room—and don’t bring other tasks or to-dos into that room.
Don’t get distracted and wander into a different room when you’re tending to your task. And if you don’t finish within the time-room you’ve carved for yourself, reassure yourself that tomorrow you’ll be back. Don’t let tasks and responsibilities spill out into other rooms. Don’t let the overwhelm of wishing you could write your book or call a friend or save the world invade your other rooms. You don’t take dirty dishes into your guest room or an unmade bed into your library. Keep them separate. Stress and anxiety come when there’s a huge mess piled up in your mind and you think there’s no way you’ll ever have enough time to straighten everything out. In your stressed-out mind, there’s nowhere even to walk around in or a chair on which to sit—it’s all taken up with other stuff.
The problem with stress and anxiety is that we allow our minds to be overwhelmed with feelings of too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time-to-do-it-in. Very quickly, that turns into judgment that we’re not good enough and that we’re not doing enough. We feel guilty and become very hard on ourselves. Or we grow resentful, even bitter, about not having the help we need.
But if we focus on a task only when we’re in a room of time that we’ve assigned to it, when that room-of-time is completed, we’re done. We’ve accomplished what we set out to accomplish, even if there’s more to do. We know we can answer more emails tomorrow. Or polish that floor the next time we go into that room. Not everything has to be done at the same time all at once, although our minds think they do! Our minds flash around with shoulds and worries and reminders and to-dos as though if we’re not doing everything at the same time, we’re not doing anything!
So when you get an email at midnight, calmly place it in your 9 am room. Don’t let it bounce around anxiously in your brain. If your kitchen floor needs scrubbing, put it in your Tuesday-morning-at-11-am room so that you don’t keep beating yourself up for not doing it. Assure those mental fidgets and pesterings that everything has its own time and place for being attended to. It has its own room. It has its own space. Be at peace.
See time as the physical thing that it is. We are physical beings, meaning we are mathematical little entities living at a juncture of time and space. We are a little dot on a graph where time and space meet. We can plot ourselves on that graph. We can mark our own existence in this marvelous physicality in which we live. With our objective, calm minds, we can choose where and when we want to do what!
So imagine time as a beautiful house, filled with lovely rooms, plenty of tall ceilings, fresh paint, and everything in its place. Time exists to help us accomplish, complete, create, and enjoy—it’s not there to harangue and harass us. There’s plenty of it. Most amazingly, the more time we make for ourselves, the more time we have.