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| photo borrowed from renegadehealth.com |
Don't get me wrong - life is great... great husband and kid, awesome farm with amazing critters, a community of friends that stretches around the world, growing fiber business... so it was hard for me to figure out why I've had such a hard time getting anything going the past couple of weeks. OK, months. The to-do list just stares at me in the face, and gives me a resounding raspberry. For the most part, I've met the obligations and appointments, and have been successful at carrying out the plans on the calendar (Farm Camp rocked, and my students amaze me!). But I have some obligations, some tasks, and some ideas - lots of big ideas - that just aren't getting any traction, and I'm frustrated with myself.
Then I remember other times this has thwarted me in the past, and I see the problem, again. In my race to excel at what we do here at the farm, I've loaded myself up with too many good things, and the plates are spinning, and the wheels are turning, and the balls are in the air, and the pressure is on, and the momentum is building, and I haven't allowed time to catch my breath, and I'm about to pass out, figuratively. (And it doesn't help that it's deep summer with high temps and humidity. I'm absolutely allergic to this weather.) The farm and I have a bit of a codependent relationship going, and neither of us wants to let up, even for a moment. The business, the social media, the farm responsibilities themselves, can seem like a ravenous coal fire that must be constantly fed with shovels full of excitement and novelty, and that will wear a girl out, if she's not careful.
So my mind and my body take the car keys, so to speak, and won't let me out of the house. I'm even slower to get going in the morning, and less inspired to tackle hard jobs. Phone calls and emails go unanswered until I shame myself into responding to the nice people who have contacted me for help in various ways. Not proud of this...
It's time for a little vacay, I guess, but I'm not sure how to do it. Not sure what it would look like. Chores still need doing and appointments still need keeping. But I will make a point of NOT feeling anxious and competitive about winning. As though I'm in an invisible race against mediocrity and ho-hum-ness, and not-quite-good-enough-ness. That's a race where it's hard to track your progress, so you keep applying the lash, just in case you're falling behind and don't know it. That'll kill ya. That's what needs to stop.
I hate whining, so I hope that's not what I'm doing. I just wanted to say, don't worry if I step back from the party just a bit, for a little while. Nothing is coming off the calendar, but probably not much will go onto the calendar for the present.
I still have big ideas and big plans. I just need to stop the wheel long enough to catch my breath. I knew you'd understand.