Meditations for Mortals - week two, day eleven

Meditations for Mortals (by Oliver Burkeman): A 4 week/28 day series with dailyish posts about the book
Week two - taking action

DAY ELEVEN
Just go to the shed
On befriending what you fear

On day eleven, Burkeman invites us to think about the things we avoid doing.

It’s an old story, he says:
Some task, or some entire domain of life, makes you anxious whenever you think about it, so you just don’t go there.

The 10,000 emails waiting for us, or the pain we should see a doctor about, or something sensitive we should talk about with someone in our family. It makes little sense, Burkeman says, since “the more you organize your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems.”

Pier and I have moved four times since we’ve been together. In our basement, there are still boxes from a move or two ago that we haven’t opened in…who knows how long. We’re not even sure what’s in them. And then, we also tend to clutter — holding onto things, and tucking them away for when we’re sure we’ll really need it (still waiting!) — and so together we’re collecting a bit of stuff.

One goal for this coming year is to declutter— not room by room, but corner by corner, shelf by shelf.

Burkeman says to “go to the shed.”

What does this mean? Your “shed” is whatever it is you’re avoiding. For us, it’s those basement boxes and the general buildup of clutter in our home.

What’s your shed? Or one of your sheds?

Burkeman’s advice:
Go to the shed. Just stand in the shed, look around, no pressure to do anything about it at all.

Pier and I have been great at that part — we’ve gone into the shed, looked around…ok, we have acknowledged there is an issue…

Burkeman talked earlier in the book about breaking an intimdiating tasks into smaller, more manageable parts. Now he offers a vivid metaphor: “befriending your rats.”

Instead of trying to slay the whole pack of rats — the whole project, the whole shed, all the basement boxes —which induces some level of anxiety, you separate out just one — “in order to more effectively stab it to death.”

But befriending a rat, he says, is something else entirely: “It’s to defuse the anxiety you feel by transforming the kind of relationship you have with it.”

He wraps up the chapter suggesting we find a practical way to befriend a gnawing rat. We can ask ourselves, Burkeman writes, by finding what we’re truly willing to do, to address some fear-inducing challenge in your life. He mentions a psychologist who couldn’t bear to start writing her PhD thesis. But then she asked herself, “how much time can I spend each day on it without feeling an anxiety attack?” Three hours? No. Two hours? Not even close. One hour? No no no. Half an hour? No thank you. Fifteen minutes? YES! Yes, she thought, now that’s a timeframe I can live with.

He finishes by saying: “Asking yourself what it would entail to befriend the gnawing rats in your life is an act requiring real courage.”

You’re acknowledging things and making progress on those things as they are.
And first step is accepting things as they are — even if you don’t like them.
(I promise we’ll do more than just look into the shed or look at one rat. I’ll share progress in a later post).

Thoughts:
What’s your shed or gnawing rat?
What can you do to make progress on it?