work through the emotional, mental, and spiritual issues that keep me from getting things done in the physical world

I’m a minor officer in a professional organization this year with a handful of responsibilities—several of which I need to act on in the next week or so. Unfortunately, about a week and a half ago, a leader of this organization pissed me off. Badly enough that if I didn’t feel some loyalty to the people who would have to pick up the slack, I would quit right now. So, now, I’m in a position of having to do all this work, but the enthusiasm for it has completely dried up.

So, my strategy is to do all of this today and get it over with. And to not require anything else of myself today except to be as kind to myself as possible. And to try to enjoy it as much as possible because it really is fun work to do and I don’t have to let the turkeys get me down.

I’m having a hard time coming to peace with the fact that I spend 4 to 6 hours a day or more just on exercising and all the tasks that go into healthy eating—shopping, prepping, cooking, eating (it takes longer to eat healthy food than unhealthy food, who knew?), and cleaning.

• There’s still a good ten waking hours a day to do other stuff.
• I enjoy a lot of these tasks, particularly walking when the weather’s nice and reading cookbooks to find new recipes to try.
• Now that I’ve started cooking nearly everything from scratch, I don’t really want to go back to my old ways.
• Even if I did go back to my old ways, I’d still be spending 2 or 3 hours a day or more on this kind of thing so it’s not that much of a time savings.

Still, I find myself almost panicking that I won’t do all the other things I want done because I don’t have enough time. Guess I need to go back and look at all my healthier attitude toward time entries.

I’ve been more productive the last few days, beginning the process of implementing my ten top goals to Make 2008 my best year yet. But I’m getting grumpier and grumpier each day. Aside from the fact that I just want to be happier than this, a pattern of increased grumpiness is unlikely to lead to continued productiveness.

There seem to be several factors contributing to the productivity / grumpiness equation.

Increased negative self talk. I’m having more thoughts like “You should this,” “You need to do that,” and “You’d better get going on this other thing.” Thus, awakening my inner rebellious teenager. I suspect I would do better focusing on what I want and asking myself questions about it. “I want a healthy strong body. What choices could I make today that would help me get that?” “I want a beautiful house. What’s the next step toward achieving that?” It might be a longer conversation, but I don’t have to be in such a hurry that I’m not talking nicely to myself.

Less time for reflection. When I spend my days in reflection, I’m happier with the way my days are going, less happy with the way my life is going. When I spend days in action, I’m happier with the way my life is going, less happy with the way my days are going. Apparently, I would do better with a balance of reflection and action. Or, maybe, I could find a way to get my action to flow from my reflection.

Greater awareness of what is undone. When I get in the mode of doing things, I’m more aware of my surroundings and what remains to be done. This leads to frustrations like “I’ll never get it all done. My efforts today were just a drop in the bucket.” I can get myself in an intellectual space where I am blind to all of that. But I don’t get much done in the physical world when I’m in that space. I don’t know how to help myself on this one.

Doing things generates more that needs to be done. We emptied the extra storage unit. Yay! Three boxes from the storage unit ended up in my study to be sorted, joining the six that were already there. Sigh. I renewed my gym membership in time to take advantage of a special year-end opportunity. Yay! The bag of stuff they gave me is sitting on the floor of my study along with the bag of stuff I need to return from a catalog order and the bag of stuff from the most recent trip to the bookstore. Sigh. I might be able to handle this one just by amusement at the human condition, or at least my condition.

Healthy living is the one area that I’ve really made great strides on this year. Until the last couple of days. So, what’s up with that? Being busy. Makes it more difficult to exercise. Makes me want to take fast, comforting breaks—something that I’ve done with food since college.

To some degree, I’ve been able to reduce the busy-ness in the last year and that has contributed to my success in this area. But I can’t count on always being able to do that. Sometimes, lots of things happen at the same time and I want a way to deal with that without totally blowing my new good habits. And this would seem to be a good time to experiment and see what works.

So, I’m going to try taking short yoga breaks for the next few days. If I find myself tempted to eat because I want a break, try reclining cobbler’s pose or legs up the wall instead.

Let’s see how that goes. I’m less worried about the reduction in exercise than I am the increase in eating, so I’ll focus on the one that worries me more first.