It’s been 4 months since my last post.

I’m forcing myself to write this post so that I do not simply succumb to inertia.

I think part of the issue is that there is a definitive surplus of things that need my attention to progress, with some subset of these things also being predicated upon one another–in the sense that doing thing A or thing B is made much simpler or faster if I first do thing C, but thing C can’t be started until thing D has gotten further along, and so forth–and ultimately far more things than I can really address in the next year or several.

Selecting a thing to direct my attention upon becomes this guilt-wracked process of “well, I really need to do this thing, but I also really need to do THAT thing,” and after a casual survey of the 15-20 different things I ought to have done by now but have neglected, I eventually select whichever one leaves me feeling the least paralyzed by my own indecision and inefficacy.

And then I may or may not make much progress on said thing until I discover some other neglected issue that also needs my attention and in a moment of weakness I might even decide “hey, this thing really IS more urgent, I should switch tasks!” And so I do.

I change lanes into some new task and maybe I get 15 minutes into that before being sidetracked by yet some newly discovered, half-finished loose-end.

And so I meander, bouncing from task to task without really progressing through anything to completion effectively, and after some several hours I find myself exhausted without really having accomplished anything meaningful.

And then there’s also the dilemma of navigating the emotional/physical difficulty/debt matrix.

It’s not MERELY that there’s an overwhelming amount of stuff to do without enough time in which to do it all.

Everything exists somewhere on this matrix in an intersection between the emotional and physical difficulty of the thing being done. The physical things are generally more easily assessed. I know that going and working in the yard all morning will take a toll on me, and I can do maybe 6 hours before I need to hang up my hat and rest for the day, or at least, shift gears into something less physically demanding. I can do more demanding physical work for shorter spans, but generally speaking I need to pad anything excessively physical with a “recovery period” so that whatever injuries I manage to aggravate can recover.

And similarly, anything intensely emotional needs a similar “recovery period” padding it, but what I find challenging is the emotional costs of random things. As stated, it’s easy to assess the relative physical difficulty of whatever given thing.

Something as simple as going through my old photo archives proves much more difficult than the simple words would suggest. It’s simply impossible not to come across photos of those who have passed. Which then turns into me browsing the photo archives thinking of how much is behind me now. How much as been lost.

In better moods, I also consider how much yet lays ahead for me, and I rather optimistically like to hope I’m not halfway through yet. But ultimately, there’s no way of knowing. And an awful lot HAS been lost.

I go out and I try to sort boxes, which can rank anywhere from like a 3 to a 7 on the physicality scale, but it’s a complete gamble on the emotionality scale. Is it a box of dad’s clothes? Oof, that’s gonna be like an 8. Is it a box of my grandma’s china? That’s probably like a 3. Is it a box of my own shit from when I was like 18? Yeah that’s probably like a 1 or a 2.

And so I find myself approaching the world through the lens of this matrix.

Knowing I have a Sisyphean amount of work yet to do to set everything in order, but before I can accomplish anything I need to apply this emotional/physical-debt matrix to determine what I can afford to undertake. And if I calculate wrong, I won’t even finish the thing, it’ll just have to get left half-done.

But things ARE getting done, at least. Very, very slowly.

And I know how to continue making progress, I just need to actually dedicate the effort to sticking with it.

The first, most important thing is to make it habitual. With anything in life, if you simply do something often, it will become an ingrained part of your life if you make it habitual and I’m of a thinking that if you do something often enough you can’t help but either get good at it or make some progress or… by whatever metric you care about, you’re bound to go SOMEWHERE.

The other thing, is focus. To pick a thing and just do the damned thing.

It may or may not be the RIGHT thing, but indecision about picking the BEST, most importantest, least emotionally painful thing is just going to leave me stuck in my head wrestling with what I should be doing instead of just… doing the actual doing.

So as much as my badly-insulated mind would like to obsess over irrelevant bullshit, picking any given thing to work on and make progress at until it’s done will help me continue to work through my list of tasks.

So if we take this emotional/physical debt/difficulty matrix and we use it strategically instead of merely as a measure of misery, we can layer the way we select tasks by alternating periods of higher physical intensity against those with higher emotional intensity, since it’s relatively rare for a task to be both high emotional intensity and high physical intensity. Since I can no longer deny myself physical recovery periods and since I am forced to concede I need the emotional recovery periods, the sensible thing to do is use my physical recovery periods as a time in which I can work on more emotionally intense stuff and conversely, use the emotional recovery periods to work on the more physical stuff.

So physical stuff, the top items on the list amount to basically yardwork, or sorting/organizing boxes. Emotional stuff is sorta all over the place.

Either way, the solution here is to stop trying to look at the big picture and stop trying to pick the best, most important things to work on, and to just keep working at getting stuff taken care of.

Saturday was an “emotionally difficult” day. I went through some of mom’s things. Yesterday I worked out in the yard for some hours (exactly how many, I lost track, but our local paletero suggested I quit working and come inside because I looked overheated [and to his credit, I was]).

Today, then, means I should make some progress on something emotionally difficult, so that tomorrow I can resume work out in the yard or moving/unpacking boxes.

So perhaps before I go and do something I find unpleasant, I’ll post a new album up here. That’s a reasonable compromise, right? Well, even if it isn’t, I’m doing it anyway.

Peace y’all, be well.

Erik