The chaotic grocery run
It may not look like it, but the possibilities are limitless. (Library of Congress photo)
She wants to travel to Europe, but it’s too expensive.
He wants to start a YouTube channel, but he doesn’t want to have to shoot and edit two videos a week for the rest of his days.
Another wants to write a book, but there are so many books already.
For every hopeful spark of desire, there exists a clause you can append to the sentence to snuff it right out. Look at the trouble you’ve saved yourself.
It is useful to figure out what we want, and just as useful to determine what we don’t want. The problem comes when we don’t leave any time and space for our desire to breathe. We’re worrying about the problems that winning the lottery would cause before we’ve even bought the ticket.
But what if we didn’t add the “but”?
To begin to ease the constriction we feel, we can grab a shopping cart and go careening through the metaphorical grocery store of our dreams on a chaotic grocery run. Everything we want, we can get — without the “but.”
You know how they say not to go shopping for groceries when you’re hungry? Well, we’re going to disregard that wisdom. We’re going to put all kinds of things into our cart without regard for whether they come together to make a meal. If we want it, we’ll grab it without thinking about the potential downside or concerning ourselves with whether it makes sense.
There are no negative consequences to the purchases you contemplate on your chaotic grocery run. When you pull it off of the shelf, you’re not committing to incorporating that ingredient into a meal tonight. You’re just saying, “I might want this.” You can figure out later how it fits with other things that you might want.
Is this the way to plan a week of meals? Not at all. But it is a helpful method to escape the way possibilities begin to harden, like the baked cheese stuck to last night’s casserole dish that stubbornly resists your best scrubbing. It’s a way of tricking ourselves into seeing a new approach to getting what we want out of life.
In truth, traveling to Europe doesn’t have to be expensive. Making videos on YouTube doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment. And the vast number of published books need not prevent us from writing our own. We can take this without that. We can invite Option A into our lives without welcoming Consequence B. Or, at least, we can suspend the “but” for awhile and see what new ideas arise.
If all of the escape routes appear to be blocked, see what you see when you take a chaotic grocery run. Make a list of what you want without questioning it or validating it. We can evaluate our ingredients in more detail later.
For me, “I want to travel more, but I can’t afford to take the time off” became, “I want to travel more.”
“I want to live by the water, but I am stuck in Atlanta” became “I want to live by the water.”
And “I want to teach math, but my degree is in music education” became “I want to teach math.”
A lot of the moves in life that have brought me the most joy have resulted from keeping the first clause and dropping the second, gathering all of the things that I want in an ongoing chaotic grocery run — and eventually, finding a way to make them real.
Is it difficult, sometimes, to figure out what to metaphorically make for my metaphorical dinner? Yes, until I remember that I have infinite metaphorical dinners and infinite metaphorical ingredients. And infinite metaphorical chaotic grocery runs in my future. It's all malleable. It’s all an adventure. Period.
