She Got a Lot Done

"She got a lot done." 

If we were being watched every day of our lives by other people, I think those watching us might think we wanted the above put on our tombstones. 

I lived that way for a large part of my life.  I woke up every day with a to-do list running through my head, vibrating with stress and adrenaline.  I ran as hard as I could, trying desperately to get everything done because I had the horrible terror that the consequences of not getting everything done would be a disaster.

There were some disasters but not because I hadn't gotten everything done.  They occurred because I was running in circles and not watching out.

Of course, I did not get everything done.  The list was way too long in the first place and in the second place I was disorganized and confused.  I had no priorities; I just tried to do everything at once.   Every moment of every day I felt like a failure because I had not done even half of the stuff on my list.

I kept up this kind of life until middle age when I absolutely could not do it anymore.  Then I had to research, study and practice to relearn how to do life differently. 

It's my belief that many, many of us are living this kind of life - a life commonly called "a rat race."  As a result we are thinking that the "life of our dreams" would be one in which we finally finished our to do list every day.  But this is not going to happen. 

It probably wouldn't have been possible to finish a to do list even in the distant past in a hunter/gatherer society although we might have been able to come close if we had the self-discipline to limit the ideas we had for things to do.  It was a much simpler life and the number of options for things to do was much simpler.  But we humans have such big brains and so much creativity, it still might have been possible to overwhelm ourselves with too much to do.

Currently, the number of things to do every day would probably take the entire population of the earth a whole year to finish.  So there's no use at all of trying to finish a to do list.  So since it's impossible, what can we do instead?

For starters:  1)  Slow down  2) Breathe 3)  Give prayerful thought to what three things you could do that would really make a difference in your life - they could be relatively small things like getting some vegetable to eat.  4) Then do those three things before you do anything else.