Sunday, December 11, 2011

Item #60: The Weight of Doing Something

“She rises in the morning, and her first thoughts go to the disasters that may have befallen during the dark hours of the night. She checks all known sources for assurance and re-assurance, feeling the panic rise in her throat in catastrophic anticipation, as she combs through all the unlikely possibilities. As her pupils register the daylight, so her mind registers some rationality. As an emerging list of things-to-do, reality comes into focus. She runs through the expectations of the day, anxiety regulating minute by minute, though never to a baseline level. Task: consider, write, review, reconsider, rewrite, re-review. Pause, close, walk away, distract. Sit down again. Consider, write, review, reconsider, rewrite, re-review. And so on. All while the beating of the heart continues its race, the formulation and prediction of possible alternative outcomes in overdrive. And then, eventually, exhaustion. No more ‘consider’ left in the cognitive pathways, no more writing left in the fingertips, no more optical reserve to channel into reviewing. And so she presses Send.”


Feel familiar to anyone?


I call it The Weight of Doing Something.


It goes by common everyday names like procrastination, perfection, and sometimes amongst the more aware and honest of us, it is named fear or anxiety.


It is that feeling of wanting to ‘do something’ followed up right behind by that feeling of ‘oh no’. That ‘it isn’t right’, ‘maybe I should talk to someone else first’, ‘I just need a little more time with it’ or yikes, ‘it’s just not good enough yet’ feeling.


This is the language of The Weight of Doing Something.


It exists for good reason. It keeps us careful. It pushes us in the direction of excellence. Maybe it forces us to stop and think a little harder at the right times.


But like much of life, it has a dark side. The Weight of Doing Something can make us never do anything. Too scared to try. Too paralyzed to risk. Too flooded with fight or flight hormones rushing through the system to act.


So how to carry The Weight of Doing Something? Well it means acknowledging its angel side resting on one of your shoulders, and its devil side perching comfortably on the other. It means heeding the cautions, the questions, the pushing for excellence that the devil side advocates, and then garnering courage from the angel side to move forward: to try, to take those calculated risks, to act.


It means telling oneself regularly how important it is that The Weight of Doing Something doesn’t become The Iron Ball of Doing Nothing.

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