Room for dessert
I’ve had to learn moderation, but on no planet am I turning down a slice of watermelon. (Image by Aline Ponce)
It’s 1:30 PM Eastern. I’ve already been awake for more than ten hours.
Yep, 3:20 AM is when the ol’ alarm went off. Early flight. I miss living in Atlanta where it seems like there are several direct flights daily to just about anywhere you might want to go.
But now, long-distance travel often requires an overnight stay away from home before we even get on the plane, and slim pickins as to the actual itinerary.
Hence, my current misery. Due to the tight schedule, I’ve been surviving on almonds and Miss Vickie’s potato chips in lieu of an actual meal. And I chose water over coffee. So here I am, hungry, tired, and uncomfortable.
I worked for a few hours on the fast and free WiFi, and then I completely ran out of steam. Or so I believed. Because here I am, writing to you, and the thought of doing that perked me up enough to be able to actually do it.
See, most of the time, time is not what we need to manage. It’s energy. In much the same way as we can be entirely full but still have room for dessert, we can run out of energy for one activity and still have plenty for another.
This isn’t the middle schooler’s excuse for being too tired to mow the lawn. Well, it isn’t just that. It’s a reality of being a person. The more I’ve accepted it, the more effective I’ve become in my life and work.
Sure, there are times when we have to do a thing even when we don’t feel like it. But for maximum results with the minimum effort, we are better off finding something that matches our mood. That means that the activity will be more likely to be energizing or energy-neutral than draining.
I’ve found that this approach lowers my resistance to doing stuff. When I’m allowed to say to myself, “No thank you, not right now,” I’m less likely to throw a temper tantrum. From this place of self-trust, I can actually perceive the moment in which I want to do something like mow the lawn. When it arrives, I get in gear (and hope that it isn’t raining).
This is how my mother, once upon a time, managed her household with four children under the age of seven. She waited for her intuition to tell her that it was time to vacuum, and then she did it. Our house wouldn’t have won any awards for tidiness, but she was able to raise us and run her own business without losing her mind.
The impulses that whisper, “now’s the time” are not logical. The other day, I spent an hour emptying an email inbox that hasn’t been dealt with since before the pandemic. Why then? I don’t know. But now that I have 40 emails in there instead of 4,000, I am more relaxed. I’ve released stress I didn’t even know I was carrying.
Obviously, the sudden urge to do something like mop the kitchen floor has to be balanced with a grasp of our true priorities, like preparing for an important meeting. But when we repeatedly resist something we’re supposed to do in favor of something else, we might want to think about redesigning our life so that, to the extent possible, it involves less of the activities we have an active resistance to and more of the ones we are excited to get going on.
It’s almost time for landing. Whereas taking five minutes to fill out a form seemed like an insurmountable task a short time ago, hundreds of words have flowed easily and satisfyingly since then. I could have sat here for a half hour trying to make myself deal with the form and gotten nowhere; instead, I followed my energy and decided to write. I feel lighter and far more refreshed than my physical circumstances would seem to allow.
Sometimes, there really is room for dessert despite our having an appetite for nothing else. We can frame this as a lack of discipline, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. As long as we manage to fit the vegetables in somewhere, we’re fine.
