Taking it easy on a wintry beach day
One of my friends recently posted something on Facebook that stopped me in my tracks (thanks, Jose!). He wrote,
“Remind yourself that sometimes doing too much can be as damaging as doing too little. Your mind and body do have their limits.”
Actual footage of my reaction:
When I saw it, I was in the middle of doing one of my most favorite things, standing in front of a laundromat washing machine stewing. The machine had had two minutes left on the timer for at least the last four minutes, and I was channeling my inner Alex Mack to will the machine to finish the wash cycle so I could throw my laundry in the dryer, run to the grocery store, run back to my apartment and drop off the groceries, and run back down and unload the dryer by the time it finished (and this was in the middle of a workday, LOL).
I had to laugh, but it was one of those laughs that make you uncomfortable because hot damn it’s hitting a nerve.
I went about the rest of my day, but the post stuck with me. My default mode is ‘go, go, go, and when you have five minutes to spare, go some more.’ I also consume a lot of content from marketing/entrerpeneursy people like Gary Vaynerchuk who preach that you should basically work until your eyes bleed or you’ll be a big fat failure, which is always encouraging. So those thoughts tend to get hammered into my subconscious.
Anyway, It was a refreshing change to hear someone call bullshit on the ‘hustle until you die’ mentality and straight up say that it’s okay to do less. That for our own sanity, we should sometimes try to do less. I’m all about it.
For me it applies mostly to my unrealistic attempts to squeeze 362 tasks into any given day, but it also works nicely for something like Thanksgiving dinner, being okay with Cracker Barrel take-out turkey instead of slaving for hours to achieve a Pinterest-worthy homemade spread.
Johnny and I are heading to Washington, D.C. tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Normally I’d be plotting and scheming a list of activities for our trip, but I’m going to give the ‘do less’ mentality a shot and go in with a blank itinerary. There are people I want to see and places I’d love to go while we’re there, but I’m going to do my best to play it by ear and not get all worked up about squeezing every last thing in.
I hope everyone has a food- and family- and wine-filled Thanksgiving. If the powers that be are listening, I’d like to ask a teeny tiny favor and request that the Gators beat the Seminoles on Saturday. Then again, for my own psychological wellbeing, I might have to *do less* and watch House Hunters instead of the game this year. We’ll see how resilient I’m feeling at kickoff time. Cheers!
