Ambling the overhwhelm

Like the centipede who 'lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run' I am lucky enough to have too many things to do. I do an interesting dayjob. I have a family. I need to explore nature, understand the world around me and express the beauty and fascination I find there. I want to challenge our discounting of the non-human, and the non-living. I want to be part of a re-wonder-ing as well as a re-wild-ing of the world. I have a list of grand plans: but my desk is a heap, and I'm overwhelmed.

I remember as a child wanting to try everything at family buffet parties and being unable to finish the resulting plateful. Not much has changed. These days people don't tell me archly that 'someone's eyes were bigger than her stomach', but it's just as true. My intellectual, passionate and creative eyes are still much too big for my practical stomach.

The sensible thing would be to prioritise and, more importantly, to de-prioritise. To make a deliberate choice to give up on part of it. I continually fail to do that, some things inevitably get sidelined anyway, but I shrink from consciously owning the choices that get made.

But I think I am prepared to own the refusal to make the choice. In spite of all the obvious good sense, there is something deeply tragic about project managing your actual life. Yes, I'm sure that deciding what really matters and then resourcing it well is a highly sensible approach. It is likely to lead to satisfying achievements. But there's not much life in it.

The project management approach is about achieving an outcome, about over-riding happenstance and opportunity. It's about the objective, and not about the journey. Life is just the opposite. In life, there is only the journey. Journey's end is unpredictable, and only rarely (and very sadly) an objective.

I believe in ambling through life. Ambling is progress without a plan: growing a journey step by step. Some steps will take you places that could be toiled towards as destinations, and some won't. The nature of the journey is flowing, opportunistic, adventurous. More fun. Every day, start from where you are and take the most promising looking next step.

But by ambling, I can keep my plate full of too many things to do. I won't pre-empt circumstance by striking dear projects off the list purely in the name of focus and achievement. Instead, I will amble through the overwhelm, and let circumstances decide, moment by moment, what actually happens.

After all, in spite of my lists, circumstances have been in charge all along anyway.