Obstacles!

I've been trying to pull my life into some kind of order lately, and in the process I ran into two things that stop me cold. One is deciding. The other is figuring out how to actually carry out whatever I've decided. (There's probably a third, procrastination, but I'll leave that one alone for today.) Both of them have a way of freezing me in place.

My house talks to me. Not in a pleasant way. I'd love it to be the calm place I come home to, but it isn't, because wherever my eyes land there's a job waiting or some small mess that needs sorting out. Trace any of it back far enough and you hit the same root: I need to make a decision about something.

People write a lot about feng shui and clearing out clutter, and there's the usual promise attached, that a cleared-out space stays clean with less effort. Fine. But organizing is nothing except choices stacked on top of each other. Where does this go? Keep it, give it away, or toss it? When we moved into this house, which had plenty of storage, my family did the moving while I was busy with work and travel. They didn't sort anything. They just tucked things into whatever corner would hold them. It's only recently that I've had any stretch of time to deal with the result.

So I'll get an hour free and think, today I'll start on it. Then I sit down to it and sink right into the deciding. A job that looked like an hour's work can swell into a full day, two if you can only chip at it in pieces. Say I decide a thing has to go. Now I have to decide how. I've got old electronics and appliances I know are useless, and then comes the real wall: where do you even take this stuff? You look it up and learn you have to show up at a particular spot during particular hours. Deciding to get rid of it was the easy half. Working out the mechanics of getting rid of it is what drags.

A chunk of these decisions only exist because I didn't make them back when they first came up. I let them pile. Do I trust my own judgment, or am I the little red hen in reverse, the one who asks everybody what to do and ends up not baking the bread because she took their advice instead of her own? There are times when the smart move is to just do the thing and move to the next one, rather than teeter back and forth burning the hours you could have spent clearing three other tasks.

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