How are you feeling lately? I am not sleeping—it could be the heat or my hormones, or the winning combo of the two—but more likely it’s the collective traumatic experience we are enduring due to what’s happening in our country. It’s hard and exhausting to continue to pay attention. I spend quite a bit of time on Expedia planning dreamy escapes to exotic places that I will likely never take in order to soothe myself.
What’s the plan I ask myself? What’s our coping strategy? The only thing that really resonates with me is lowering the bar of effort on everything. Making the day to day tasks easier and slowing it all down.
Take the flower arrangement above for example. Yesterday, I went out to the sunflower patch in the afternoon heat and cut a handful of bright orange Mexican sunflowers and a couple of basic yellow ones and then plopped them in a vase. I moved maybe two or three stems to balance them in the vase and called it good. They are on the dining table bringing me joy and I am unbothered by their lack of being “arranged.”
In fact, their simplicity and wonkiness endears them to me more. Ah, this is a breakthrough, and I am now applying this low amount of effort to other areas of my life. Recently I removed the decorative pillows from my bed and just pull the duvet up each morning. I am thinking about ditching the top sheet too, because I like a made bed but don’t want it to take more than a minute. This easy change has made my mornings so much calmer.
This morning after walking our dog, my husband and I were planning our week ahead and I said, “I don’t want to make dinner all week” a rare thing for me. I told him I want that time for other things I am working on and it excited me to think about how freeing that statement was, and how much more time I would have.
In typing this now I can feel my body relax knowing that I won’t need to grocery shop, plan a meal, cook or clean up for five days. I can feel my energy returning just thinking these thoughts. Suddenly I look forward to my now easier week.
In typing this now I am considering not making dinner for the whole month.
Maybe you’ll join me for the rest of the summer in lowering the effort bar? How can we make life slower, calmer and easier? This will give us the energy to continue to pay attention and take care of our ourselves.
Forget swimming laps, this is the summer of the lazy river.
The thought of not cooking dinner for a week sounds liberating!!