It is inconvenient and annoying that our past interferes with our present.

We want to change — or maybe we've already changed — and the results of our past decisions follow us around like Pigpen's dust cloud in the old Peanuts comics.

I'm talking about things like debt, clutter, old contracts that still have time on them, and things you said yes to but have not yet completed. It's the backlog of tasks, projects, and other obligations that you have accumulated.

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It would be nice to escape right about now.

The trouble is, there's nowhere to escape to. And even if there were, they'd probably cancel your flight out.

So here we are, dealing with a reality that is once again not cooperating with our wishes. My heart goes out to anyone whose plan—whose life—has been upended by the new variant, along with all those who were already suffering before Omicron came to town. It's really hard.

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My mind feels mushy.

It's like I'm peering out from inside a cloud. It's hard to think or even hold up my head. It's definitely hard to write this.

I hit my limit this week. I had to do some work that is really hard for me. Objectively, it was the same "sit at the laptop and type" as always. But I was fighting a significant amount of resistance. Doing the thinking felt almost physically painful. Maybe it actually was.

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The other day, I finally went back to a coffee shop that I had last visited sometime in March 2020.

I'd grabbed coffee and snacks there from time to time, but I hadn't brought my laptop to do work there since right before the pandemic.

Going there used to be a key part of my routine. I would convince myself that a change of scenery was necessary in the middle of my workday—that I could not possibly get more work done in the same spot I'd been sitting in for the past three hours.

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When we think of decluttering, we might think of removing physical objects from our lives.

It’s a process that has to happen periodically. That’s because the default is to hang onto the things we’ve purchased or gained that are or were useful.

But we need to declutter not only the physical objects in our lives, but other things, too: time commitments, broken systems and processes, relationships, and even plans and dreams.

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