Most routine things we need to take care of do not take as long as we like to think they do. We like to think it will take too long to validate our procrastination. I heard Joyce Meyer speak about how she got so angry once because she went into the bathroom and the toilet paper roll needed to be changed. That can be irksome. However, she was livid, justifying her anger by the fact she had a full-time housekeeper so she thought there was no reason she should ever have to change the toilet paper. In the middle of her rage, God popped in to inquire about her anger explosion. This got her attention. She decided to time how long it actually took to change out the empty roll for a new one. 15 seconds! That's how long it took, 15 seconds. She was throwing a temper fit over a task that took 15 seconds to perform. She was stepping outside God's will for her behavior over a 15 second task. Her spiritual fruit was being squeezed into juice over 15 seconds. We know there is more to that mentality than the task but that's not our topic for today.
Her story made an impact on me and I've made a point to be more aware of how long it actually takes to do things. Even when my kitchen looks like it exploded, it doesn't really take that long to get it back into shape. Earlier, I put my cold cup of coffee in the microwave for 1 minute 10 seconds to reheat. While all that was going on, I fed the tribe of cats on the front deck and still had 10 seconds to spare. I surveyed my meds divider while I waited. Tick tock, tick tock...finally the coffee was hot.
Hanging the clothes on the line takes 5-8 minutes depending on what I'm hanging. Taking them down and folding takes about the same time. Yet, it seems like doing the outdoor laundry thing would take longer. It does not. Making my bed, 8-12 seconds, depending on how restless the night.
My point is that we make life less "Simple" by our mentalities more than the tasks we must do. If we decide up front we do not have time, then we won't. We will make sure we don't. Sometimes by not even trying or starting. If we decide we will do all we can do in an allotted time slot, then we will make progress. Progress is defined by the effort, not the results. If it takes three days of assigning 15 minutes a day to accomplish a task, say cleaning out a dresser, then you're still one dresser drawer closer each day than you are if you don't do anything because you don't have time to do it all at once.
Getting order and de-cluttering our lives is a process, it takes time. We need to give ourselves permission to enjoy the process rather than beating ourselves up because we haven't done everything. Doing a piece of a task is far better than doing none of the task. Enough pieces make a whole, like a jigsaw puzzle. I find that on the days I dust the living room, I'm less likely to leave things in there at the end of the day. I do not want my efforts thwarted, so I take 2 minutes to gather up and distribute things back where they belong. One short task begets another..and so on and so one.
As I said earlier, it is our mentalities that need shaking more than our rugs. We get locked into thinking about and looking at habits, rituals, ways of doing things that may have worked for us at one time but could be outdated and worn out for our life today. Just because we've always done something one way doesn't mean we can't look for a new, refreshing way to do it. Procrastination can bind us up when we focus on what we can't do rather than what we can accomplish. For every reason/excuse our mind says, "No way!" we need to list three reasons that say, "Oh, yes we can!" They're out there...the reasons we can...we just have to think about how to get to them rather than sitting on our "no way" bottoms - which, my Friends, is our biggest stumbling block on our way to living a more satisfying and simple life!
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