Nothing ever happens without a decision. The decision is the catalyst. But it’s a bit like the difference between a passive sentence and an active sentence. One has the idea but the other has the action required to make it come alive. It’s a case of getting rid of the verbiage and concentrating on the verb—the small but mighty part where the ‘to do’ comes in.

I’ve been away from gym for a considerabe time because I chose to let it slide due to work commitments. I had previously made the decision to be the sort of person who exercised at least a certain amount, which is why I started going to the gym for small workouts  two years ago. Today, I am making the decision to go back after a time away. Decision or no, it will never happen unless I get my verbs up to speed. Dress. Pack water and  gym tag. Leave. Drive to gym. Do what you went there to do. The decision itself is just so much hot air unless I pair a verb—or a number of verbs—with it.

I have noticed that there are two verbs—’doing’ steps—which are more important than all the other steps that go into making this decision active. They’re the ones which are the main sticking points if I let other things get in their way: Getting dressed in appropriate clothes and getting out the door.  So for me, they’re the two on which the entire operation rests. Once I’m out the door, the rest of the sequence falls into place without any great effort on my part, because of the momentum which has already been created.

So it’s not just a thought. It’s a number of small steps, of which two are key. The knack is to find, whatever the subject of your decision, which couple of steps are the ones most likely to put you on the path to success.

This is all very simple stuff, but it can help to look at the process if you have trouble with follow-through. Perhaps it’s a case of (to paraphrase George Orwell), all steps are equal, but some are more equal than others.

It seems that life gets in the way of our hopes and dreams. We are so busy just doing the tasks in front of us that we don’t get to the things that are really important to us. Sometimes those things that might have been important once lose their urgency and inherent energy and we wonder why we even wanted to do them in the first place. Or dared to think we were good enough for such an undertaking.

I think this can be a danger sign. If we thought, once, that it was something we wanted to do, perhaps we have simply ignored it long enough that its unique energy has dissipated and what’s left is only a cold husk of our initial passion or idea.

This happens to me. I think I might like to do something but there are so many other jobs that need completing that I put the thing I want to do on the backburner. Yet when I have time to do it. the passion has gone. The energy is no longer there. This has happened many times in my life but it is only now that I am questioning it. Is it that I talk myself out of it once the initial flush of enthusiasm is gone? Do I need to make a start when the thought is new? Am I simply fickle? If it is something worthwhile for my life, how do I get my enthusiasm back? What is the first step that I need to take?

These are all good questions. Is there a way to get that enthusiasm to return? To re-ignite the passion? Can you take an old idea and somehow infuse it with the just-born newness it had when you first met it? And if you can, the next question is a simple one. How?

Ah, the futility of it all. Of knowing that I keep sliding down that slippery slope only to do the same 10 hard yards all over agian. Or 10kg. Or whatever.

That’s why I said way back at the start that it has to be a paradigm shift. A new mindset. But perhaps it’s a mind-body thing. They both have to be ready. No, the body is always ready for something better to be fed into it. It’s definitely a mind thing.

How does one become an enlightened being? Is it a slow sunrise, inexorable and from darkness to brilliance in imperceptible stages? Or is it the flicking of a light switch to instant light? Perhaps it works differently for different kinds of people.

I don’t know. All I know is the futility of having even a modicum of knowledge and not using it. Of knowing what to do and not doing it. Every day is a new opportunity to do well, to honour our bodies, our selves, our world. Yet many of us go through life in a dream state, never really awakening to the truth of how to eat, to think, to live. I think it has become too hard. We are bombarded with so much information, some of it which may be right!, that we end up with overload and our reaction is to overload our bodies as well.

We think we have to be able to create amazing vegan dishes, or paleo masterpieces or whatever is the diet flavour of the month. We have to be foodie whatevers. We need a title, a name, an identity. We don’t simply eat. Within a span of 20 years the game has seemingly changed forever. And yet there are people in the world who every day do not get enough to eat or who eat the same kind of food every day and are content with that.

For me, my kitchen habits changed when my cirumstances changed, and I have never returned to the more disciplined and more simple meals of that time. Some of it is an expectation. I think that now I have to be able to prepare so many different types of foods. I think that what I had in the past was not good enough for today’s sophisticated world. But at the heart of things, I know this is wrong. I know that simplicity is good. Simplicity is the state to strive for, to accomplish. Meals can be simple affairs. They do not have to be orchestrated and presented with overt flair. They just need to be made of the right componentry.

So today I am thinking to simplify at least some of the meals in our house. To clear some of the backlogs in other parts of my life as well and to pay attention to how simple I can make the repetitive things in my life.

It seems to me that enlightened beings never have complexity in their life. They see things clearly and their lives have an enviable simplicity. They’re not addicted to anything. They don’t crave complex cuisine. They are happy with simple and natural.  And that in itself is fulfilling enough.

If there’s one thing that makes life easier when you get super busy, it’s having the PIA gene. It’s a special ability to see a job right through to its natural conclusion. This is something for which tidy people have a natural affinity and that others can only admire and wonder about.

No, not really. It’s eminently learnable and it’s not a gene, it’s a muscle. As with any muscle, it get stronger the more you use it. PIA is, quite simply, putting it away. You go out to buy groceries. When you return you bring your shopping bags in from the car, put them on the kitchen bench then quickly go through and put the cold goods into the fridge or freezer. The rest can wait. True, but not if you want to use your PIA muscle. Doing the job to its natural conclusion means putting everything away including the shopping bags.

Here’s another example. Doing the dishes. ‘Doing’ is shorthand for washing, drying and putting away.

Clothes need to be washed, dried (I prefer to peg on a line outside then bring in), folded/hung, ironed as necessary and placed in wardrobes or drawers. These are not difficult jobs. Parts of them are time consuming, but not hard. To make the chore easier to fit into your schedule, you might divide it into washing and ironing. In that case, clothes that require ironing need a temporary, specific home until that task is completed.

Just about every repetitive chore we do is not really one task but a series of small steps that need to be accomplished in a certain order. There are a few sticking points with this whole scenario. Some people are inherently lazy and just won’t do more than they have to do at the time. This actually creates more tension, more mess and more work for your future self, so get past this attitude and go the extra mile which may take mere seconds and will definitely save time in the long run. And don’t use the excuse that you’re too busy. You are almost never too busy to do tiny actions.

The biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is within the PIA part. Not the actual action involved in PIA, but the ‘A’ itself. For this to work, you have to have an ‘Away’ to Put It. That’s the secret tidy people have. Every solitary little thing has its very own ‘away’. And here’s the paradox: Although putting it away is right at the end of the sequence, the ‘away’ part needs to be decided at the beginning.

Spend as much time as you can spare finding the perfect home for things. Some kinds of items can be roughly organised into a certain basket. Others need a designated space—so precise you could draw around its base like those shadow boards for tools. The message here is that this is the exact spot for this thing. When the item is not in its home, that space is empty. If closets and cabinets are already bulging, they’re the problem, not the thing that doesn’t have a place to call its own. If you don’t use certain closets or cabinets because they’re a nightmare to open, that should be a red flag telling you this needs your attention—preferably with a rubbish bag and donation box close by.

If you have to clean out a whole cupboard (or multiples thereof) to get to that happy place where you have exact spots for all your items, this is going to take time. But once that work is done, PIA is so easy you don’t need to exercise your mind about it ever again. Just exercise your PIA muscles and your countertops and tables will be clear, your demeanour will be calm and your next task will be that much easier.

“We always manage to get done those things we choose to do first.”

This month, I am living by Jim Rohn’s words. That, and the idea that I will find a way, as long as I am  fully committed. I had been feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work facing me, but with those few words I am bringing it all into the realm of the possible.

For me, it feels like it is more than prioritising, and yet I suppose it is not. It is so simple, so obvious. Blindingly obvious, one would have thought. But in this era of the easy distraction, sometimes the very simple gets lost in the noise.

I have found that I have a certain amount of mental energy available. It’s a kind of vital energy which is quite high early in the day and if I start early on the tasks that must be done that energy usually pulls me over the finish line. If I check emails or look at something, anything, on the web, that energy dissipates like fog when the sun hits it and I no longer have the motivation, desire or, it seems, even the ability to focus properly on the important task before me.

If I am fully committed to this one thing, other tasks may not be done. If I let other things slide this month, that’s okay.

I must pay bills, so I deal with them, as much as possible, as they arrive. That keeps them out of my head space because I know I’m up to date. I have downrated my commitment to gym. I just fit it in as I can, and if I can’t, I can’t. The minutiae of housework crystallises into simple food preparation, doing the dishes, washing and the minimum of ironing possible, grocery shopping and the occasional whip around with vacuum and cleaning cloth. The house will not fall into complete disarray just because of a few cobwebs on the ceiling or dust bunnies under the bed.

I am finding previously lost time nearly everywhere because this one thing is my priority. There is no such thing as working hours and leisure hours. This one task suddenly has dominion over it all. Suddenly there are many more hours available to do the job that must be done. It’s a good feeling.

Sometimes I feel stuck. Stuck in my circumstances, the things I have to do, my  life. I feel limited by things I feel I cannot change. That’s when I need to remind myself that …

The world is full of possibilities
I simply haven’t seen yet.

When I need to get a job done, I often start by clearing the decks.

In the mornings when I prepare a packed lunch, if there are clean dishes on the bench from the night before, I put those dishes away before I start rather than just sweeping them to one side in a big messy heap. If I’m going to fold clothes on the bed, the chore works better if the bed is made. When I’m under the pump with work, I clear away extraneous papers and the jobs they contain so I can attend to the single most important task of the moment.

It’s not only that I dislike working in a mess—it has to do with the brain’s visual processing. Everything is more complex when there is too much in your line of vision. Your brain has to process that picture, whether you consciously realise it or not. The cluttered view makes it harder to start, harder to accomplish and harder to clean up afterwards.

Having clear space is cleaner so that’s a good reason to get rid of the excess clutter. Even more important is the fact that when you have clear surfaces, your head works better. The items you need to use, and only those items, are all there perfectly visible in front of you. When you’re finished, you know which bits should be put away because you just keep putting items away until the surface is clear again.

There is something paradoxical about being surrounded by a plethora of stuff. You’d think that because it’s all there in plain sight you’d want to deal with it. But no, it’s just the opposite.

When the freezer is so packed that you virtually have to dismantle the insides to get to something, it’s pretty overwhelming. You’re probably going to take the easier option and leave it all there for another day. If the fridge is overstuffed, it’s sadly easier to have takeaway. If you virtually have to unpack the cupboard to get at an item, you’re much more likely to shrug your shoulders and walk away.

Cleaning is harder with a house that has stuff on every surface and spilling out onto the floor. Twenty things on the dresser? I don’t even want to try to dust. One object, beautifully placed? I can pick it up in one hand while dusting with the other. Easy, quick, satisfying.

It’s very gratifying being happy to start a task. Making lunch? Pull the one plastic container out of the fridge, put it on the clear bench and dive straight in, knowing the container has every fridge item inside it for that one job.

It’s so much simpler when there’s wriggle room in the fridge, when you can see what you need in the freezer at a glance and can pull it out without starting an avalanche. Sitting down at a clear office desk makes you more prepared to dive into your work. It truly is so much easier for your brain to work when it’s not being bombarded by the sight of teetering piles.

So if clearing the decks works so well, the obvious next step is to create a lifestyle where the decks are clear all the time. That may require considerable thought and preparation. It may mean clearing out. Deleting. Editing. Downsizing. The secret is to have a proper home for every single thing, and simply put all items away in their home when they’re not in use. Simple. Even if it takes a couple of months to implement, this has the potential to be life changing.

So now it’s time to stop thinking and do something about it. Prepare a green smoothie for energy, then start. Where? At the thing right in front of you. Hmmm. Looks like it’s the fridge, then …

Stories. We have so many stories. We live our lives telling them, repeating them, believing them.

We make up stories to help us understand something that has happened which is simply not comprehensible to us otherwise. We create stories to tell a great tale. We expound (and expand, let’s admit it) to be entertaining over the dinner table or on our blog or anywhere else we tell our tales. Sometimes our stories are so positively powerful that they can change lives. But often we create stories that limit us. These stories define us by reducing us. They also stop us from living in reality because we are wasting our precious present by rehashing the past.

We all have stories that we trot out. I’m not good at this because of something unfortunate that happened in my youth. Whenever I try this, something goes wrong. I can’t do that because my addictive personality makes it too difficult. We let these stories have dominion over us. We believe them. They gain a terrible potency that if we could look at them clearly we would never allow. Whoever among us wants to limit themselves and their abilities simply by giving up because of something that might have happened in the past?

As I grow older, I am becoming more of a fatalist. Not for what might happen in the future, but for the events of the past. So I’m a kind of backwards fatalist, I suppose. That thing happened, therefore it was meant to be. Seeing it from this standpoint takes away all the gnashing of teeth and wishing it could have been otherwise. Believing that it’s fate means that we don’t need to doubleguess what might have been, could have been, should have been. But the secret sauce is this: It happened when it happened. Not now. If I’m telling a story about it, the storytelling might be in the present but the event is firmly in the past. The story is not the thing. The thing, whatever it might be, is gone. It happened at a certain time and should not now be a part of my present.

This can be used for everything, including the kind of food we choose to eat and the kind of bodies we choose to have. What we have now may indeed be from choices we made in the past. We can’t do anything about that, but now, this moment—that’s alive. That’s something we can work with. In fact, that’s all we ever have.

Many times it would be better to let our stories go. To allow them to sleep in the past … where they belong.

2015 is International Year of Light. I’m going to have my own personal Year of Light, and considering health is a topic near and dear to my heart, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I mean that I want to lighten my bodyweight.

But this year I want to lighten a different load—the weight of the contents in my house. I think that how a house’s interior looks has a huge influence on how you feel, day in and day out. So I have happily decided this year to make my house look light and airy. Every single thing in it will have a proper home. I will concentrate on the things that are important to me now and keep them in such a way that they are easy to access and to enjoy. This is going to be an exciting time. I will be cleaning up little messes that I’ve had hiding away in corners for years. When I have finished, my possessions will be a much more accurate indication of what I treasure in my life.

That will lighten my spirits as well as the house, I’m thinking! I am expecting this experience to be one of joy and peace. Sounds a bit like a Christmas message, doesn’t it? But joy and peace should reign in a house all year round, not just at Christmas.

Most of us see “What is” as the start of a question. But lately it has shown itself to be a statement of fact and therefore the start of a letting go process for me.

Over the decades I have invested huge amounts of energy fighting against “what is” in all its incarnations. I have railed against it; I have shouted, cried, whinged and whined. I have let it affect my mood, my attitude, my actions. I have also wished during those years that I could change myself—my attitudes, my responses. I have tried in ways that I now think of as being from the outside in. But perhaps there is another way—an internal way—that once accomplished will affect my responses without much further effort on my part.

Some of the thoughts that I have wasted my precious energy on, day after day, are like these: I should be more tolerant. He could pick up after himself. She should appreciate me more. They should do more to help. The world should be a safer place.

I have found two things that are helping me at the moment. One is the idea of business. Whose business is this? If it’s something to do with ‘out there’, it’s God’s business. If it has to do with my partner, my mother, my colleague, or any other person in the world, it’s their business individually. Only when it concerns me and me alone is it my business.

So now the only ‘should’ I need to consider is my own. Letting myself stay out of other people’s business is giving me so much more free mental time  that I often actually ‘hear’ what I am thinking—and the ‘should’ word has started to stand out like a neon light. Discovering how thoughts can circle and circle around a topic like carrion waiting to land is fascinating and empowering. Empowering because once I realise what I am thinking it is almost effortlessly morphing into a case of I do … or I do not. This applies to subjects big and small. I donate money towards starving people and third world country start-ups instead of saying that someone should do something. I pick up the clothes on the floor instead of criticising others for not doing it. I tidy up after them because I am the one who wants the tidy house, not them. Or I do not, and I am okay with that too.

This is so liberating when it comes to how I think about other people. They are who they are and they do what they do. They shouldn’t be anyone else or do anything else. It is also working for myself. I don’t have so many thoughts along the lines of,  I should be more understanding, patient, tolerant or I should be less intense, judgemental, critical. Those parts of my personality are very much dictated by how I perceive the other person or event. Once I stop trying to be the puppeteer—the strings I have been unhappily yanking at haven’t given me the desired result anyway!—those parts of my personality lose much of their negativity. I now find myself, when I am experiencing these thoughts, starting to think more about what is underneath them—and so far it has always been that it is me thinking that someone or something else should be different. As I have more clarity about this—as I see it earlier and earlier in my thought processes—the whole problem of not being understanding enough, patient enough, tolerant enough; pretty much fades away. As I invest less personality to my thoughts, I am unexpectedly happier.

Instead of fighting with ‘what is’, I am more and more simply seeing it. Once identified as something out of my realm, I can relax. If it’s something to do with me, I can roll up my sleeves and get to work.

Credit:
With thanks to Byron Katie and her book “Loving What Is” or making me think about ‘what is’ in a totally different way.