Balled-up ideas

It’s nice if whatever you’ve got to work with smells like fresh air. (Image by Willi Heidelbach)

I like nothing more than to help someone lay out the possibilities for their life and work, sort and organize them, and develop a plan for what to do.

I love to share in the feeling of clarity that comes from taking a step forward on a meaningful project, confident in what needs to be done and what it takes to do it.

The feeling that leads us to that moment can be quite uncomfortable. When we have a bunch of stuff we’re trying to figure out, it’s like it’s all tangled up.

Everything’s overlapping and balled up and half hidden, kind of like a load of clean laundry that’s been dumped into a basket.

What we have to do is get everything laid out so we can see what’s there and how it all fits together.

To do that with laundry, we pull out the pieces one by one. We smooth and fold and categorize.

To do that with our ideas, we talk about them and to write about them, ideally with the help of another person.

We ask questions. What is this for? Who is this for? Where does this fit?

And why do I want to do it? (And why again, and why again.)

We can start to see which ideas relate to each other. We can see which thing to do first, which thing to do after that, and which things to let go of and give away to charity.

Once we’ve done this sorting and organizing, everything seems a lot simpler. Whereas the laundry was unknowable when it was all tossed together, now we can see exactly how many pairs of socks we have and how many shirts.

Similarly, inventorying a few of the ideas we have can make the prospect of acting on them less overwhelming. The edges appear. The scope becomes finite. Instead of facing an endless slog, we uncover some initial outcomes we can shoot for and a way to measure tangible progress.

We’ve reduced overwhelm by being selective in our attention. It would never do to leave everything visible. Our folded laundry gets put away neatly in drawers and on shelves. We are under no obligation to wear those clothes right away, and we would never wear them all at once.

Likewise, ideas are nice to have, but there doesn’t have to be anything urgent about them. They don’t always represent problems to solve or immediate actions to take. They can sit dormant indefinitely. Some of them will go out of style while they’re not being used, but that’s okay. We’re getting wear out of the ones that suit us best.

If you are struggling with balled-up ideas, there’s nothing wrong with just grabbing one off the top whenever you need it, like a college kid’s low-maintenance approach to laundry.

But if you’d like more confidence and less chaos in your work and in your mind, you can try laying things out, sorting, and folding. It’s not what you want to spend all of your time on, but it’s time well spent — even when there’s going to be another load coming tomorrow.

May you always have piles of ideas that fold like a load of towels and not like a load of baby clothes.