“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” ~William James
Messiness drains me. Clutter depresses me. Piles repel me and send me fleeing to the sanctuary of a clean space. Yet by my nature- a creative ADHD writer, who often is somewhere in my head, nowhere attached to what my body is doing, I can be a horrendous slob.
My world can look like the Pig Pen character from the Peanuts cartoon, with an unconscious trail of stuff left in the wake of everywhere I’ve been. I come out of my writing and creating fog and blink…look around and say, “Who made this mess?”
Oh…it was me. I follow myself back around, retracing my steps, amazing myself at how much mess I can make without even knowing it.
When I am consciously attached to my body, things are usually different. And they are different for one exact reason.
I decide that they will be. Over and over and over again, one moment at a time.
You see, I obviously wasn’t born with the neat gene. I missed the organized one too. And for that matter, the day I was being genetically strung together, the Great Creator must have run out of balance, consistency and predictability.
I got gypped out of the whole lot of them.
For awhile in my young twenties- I used to spend a good deal of my time using that as an excuse for why I couldn’t manage to get anything done. I stepped over the mess on my bedroom floor, lived in wrinkled clothes, spent hours hunting down lost papers and files,and never managed to put a meal on the table because the disorganization in my kitchen made cooking too damn much work.
My mother used to call my car the trash-mobile. When ever she had to get into it, she would bring along her own garbage bag.
I kid you not.
I would always say the same exact thing.
“Yeah, I’m gonna clean it out.”
She’d look at me disbelievingly.
“When?”
“Soon.”
“When is soon?”
I shrugged.
Soon didn’t come for years.
Once in awhile I would get motivated. Some miracle of inspiration would strike and I would become a whirling dervish, cleaning, tossing, folding, shining, organizing, and creating systems that would last exactly as long as it took to create them.
I would sit in the middle of my spic and span world, happy, peaceful and proud and VOW…SWEAR…and PROMISE myself that this was IT. Never, ever again would I go back to being the hopeless slob of my past, I had turned over a new leaf.
I never made it past three days. And I had no idea how it ever happened. No idea how the mess came back, how the organization unraveled, how the hellhole came and swallowed up my shiny clean life AGAIN.
Only that it did, and I was helpless against the tide that came in and drown me every single time.
It was depressing. It was hopeless. I beat myself up over it mentally with a giant stick. I called myself names. Lazy was the nicest one. Others I can’t print here.
I got discouraged. I said what’s the use in even trying. It doesn’t work anyway. I’ll never have the perfectly spotless house that I want, so what’s the point?
I quit. I gave in to being a horrendous slob.
How it all changed.
One day in my mid-twenties, one of my college friends called me a perfectionist. I stared at her incredulously. “You are standing in the middle of my pigsty house, calling me a perfectionist?” I shot back at her. “Does this look like the house of a perfectionist to you?”
She looked around carefully, hands on hips. “Yep, it does, “she nodded, grinning. “A procrastinating perfectionist. I can spot them every time.”
I rolled my eyes. I thought she was crazy.
She wasn’t.
Up until that time, I was a straight A student, the thought of getting a B made me physically ill. A striver of life, I never took on anything unless I thought I could excel at it, get it right, get it perfect. If I didn’t have the time to finish something and finish it right- I didn’t start it. Ever. And that included everything.
Like exercise, housework and a million other things.
The realization hit me hard like a brick between the eyes. This unconscious rule was a guiding principle in my life, left over from being a small child when my father used to call me Half-job Wendi if I didn’t finish something. I hated the name so much, I made sure never to start something I couldn’t finish. And that hidden rule had been guiding my actions ever since.
I made up my mind to toss that rule out of my life.
It wasn’t easy. The replacing rule became: do what you can now and do a little more later. And pick up after yourself.
And one more thing.
Stop being a jerk to myself.
It was time to stop beating myself up because my house- and my life-wasn’t perfect. It was time to stop beating myself up because I didn’t have some imaginary long stretch of time to MAKE my life perfect the way the image of it was in my oh so over-active imagination.
It was time to call that image exactly what it was.
Fiction.
It’s no wonder I am a fiction writer. I’d been writing fiction about my own life as long as I could remember- but hadn’t realized it. I had been trying to turn it into real life.
It was time to stop it all.
I gave up the dream of having a perfectly clean house and settled for having a house that is pretty clean, kind of organized and- when I am paying attention- clutter free.
But the biggest breakthrough happened when I stopped the overwhelming procrastination and “Waiting to have time” and decided to focus on just one moment.
Just This One Moment
What finally dawned on me is that there is no time to do anything except for just this one moment. All of the promises- and lies- that we tell ourselves about how we are going to spend our time in the future are out of our control. We can make plans, we can create lists, we can design strategies and schedules and plans until the cows come home. But, as any mother can tell you, the old quote-Life is what happens to you when you are busy making plans is the absolute truth. You honestly have no idea what the future holds. The only moment you know anything about at all is just this one moment.
And you get to decide what to do with it. Will you waste it? Or will you use it to move your future forward and make your life better?
It is that simple- and that profound. The key to stopping procrastination is to decide how you are going to use just this one moment right now…and then make another decision right after that about the next moment.
And keep deciding.
When I live my life wide-awake, attached to my body and making the moment by moment decisions, my house is clean, my energy level is high, my body is well fed with healthy food, gets fresh air and exercise, plenty of sleep and I take care of myself and family.
When I check out, fall mentally asleep and hang out in a fog in my head, live reactively, and forget to decide, I wake up to find myself in a cluttered, piled up messy house with five extra pounds on my body and no healthy food in the fridge.
All because too many undecided moments stretched into an undecided life.
Then I stop, wake up again, and decide, just one moment at a time to do better.
