Do less

Why do I consistently overestimate what can do in a day? Yesterday’s list was short. Give the house a quick clean, do a load of laundry, write, exercise, and go to tea at a new friend’s house. A Saturday is long and those activities are simple enough. My life is simple enough.

But I managed only three of the five: housecleaning, laundry, and tea. No writing or exercise unless you count vacuuming as exercise, which I did just to make myself feel better.

This is a consistent pattern. If I make a to-do list for a day I almost never get through the whole thing, though I always think the list is reasonable and I should be able to do all of it. I think the same pattern applies to my life as a whole. I may be systematically overestimating what I can accomplish.

Don’t get me wrong. I am anything but an overachiever. I live an easy life. I work half time from home and my children are grown and doing very well on their own, thank you. I am a bit on the lazy side and secretly critical of the way many of my friends overschedule and overwork themselves (though at the same time I admire their discipline and accomplishments). I have tried over the years to simplify, simplify, and even drop expectations that make me unhappy.

And yet I consistently overestimate what I can or should do in a day, a week, a lifetime. It’s as if there is an internal bargaining process going on, with one voice always haggling for more and another arguing for far less, so that the actual deal—what I do in a day or my whole life--ends up somewhere in the middle.

I am afraid to stop this bargaining process for fear I will do nothing at all.

This is the default message of our culture. Always do more. Stretch yourself, work harder, work out longer, hold that yoga pose for 30 seconds beyond your endurance, achieve more than your parents, and give your children more opportunities than you had. It’s the message I internalize in the powerful voice that tells me daily, I must expect to do 10 things in order to do 6 or else I will end up an utter, lazy fool of a failure.

But any message based on fear deserves a second look.

If you ever go to a Feldenkrais class (that’s my daughter’s website), you will hear a different message. As you move your body gently this way and that, the instructor will often say, “Do less.” Don’t stretch, don’t push through the pain, don’t even get close to it. Instead, pay attention to what is happening as you move, how one part relates to another, the subtle changes, the hidden resistance, the openings, the alternative patterns, the sequences.

Do less because your body learns not by force but by “awareness through movement,” as the method titles itself.

I wonder if that applies to everything else in life? Maybe that’s what the other bargaining voice has been trying to say all along.

Do less. Move. Watch what happens.