I firmly believe that you need to embrace your faults before you can change them. You need to acknowledge that your are not prefect. Then you can work to improve those area.
My main problem? I am lazy.
I have trouble living in the present and getting done the things that most people do as habit. I am a procrastinator. I put things off, meaning to do them later, but as we all know, later never comes.
When I am motivated I can get a massive amount of things done as I did this weekend while moving plants, furniture, and spring cleaning my house. However on the days I am not motivated or when it is a chore I hate doing it hangs out for days, weeks, heck…months.
The dishes pile up, the food in the fridge rots, the papers are piled on every surface imaginable. The dust bunnies are multiplying and breeding with the clumps of dog hair. Books get strewn everywhere with no rhyme or reason.
It is a constant fight to remind myself that if I just do it now, then I will not have to work like a dog to get it done later when it have gotten 100 times worse.
There is something profound and yet minimalist about this advice. It’s: don’t get your head caught up in all this thinking about the meaning of life … instead, just do. Just wash your bowl. And in the washing, you’ll find all you need. Remembering to do these things when we’re done with the activity isn’t just about neatness. It’s about mindfulness, about completing what we started, about being present in all we do instead of rushing to the next activity. Wash your bowl, with care and joy.
Completing an action. I love to do lists because it means I can check off something as done. I love working with my hands and seeing the finished product because it is visible proof that I am done. A clean house is visible proof that I spent time getting it that way. Maybe I need to find a way to make my other projects visibly have a way to signify that it is complete?
Limits are not the point of minimalism, but they accomplish something important: they force us to figure out what’s important. And if we don’t want to figure out what’s important, they force us to figure out why.
I talk about moving a lot. My mother called me on it yesterday and asked when I was planning to move. The answer is I have no idea. But staying in the same town I was born on and not traveling and pushing myself, is to me a “limit”. I need to get out to see if what I want is to stay “home” in my home town or if I can find a town more suited for myself and what I want out of life somewhere else.
My original plan was to move after living in my home for 6 years. The end of this year will make it 4 years I have lived there. I plan to start saving for the move the winter of this year. Where I am moving too? No idea. What I want is a town where I have parks to walk in, access to a barn to ride at. Grocery stores that sell things near to where I live. A small place with a yard (bonus, I can make do without the yard as I am now, but I would like to be able to have a small garden). Lots of theaters and shows to go to.
Just got sent an article by my wonderful Buzz friends about procrastination, lol. They are hoping to soon have a medical treatment for it.
One reason we procrastinate has to do with dopamine, which is what allows us to draw the connection between the work we do and the reward for completing said work. In the carrot-and-stick analogy, dopamine is the carrot: It gives us the little high when we get close to the finish line, and the anticipation of that high. Here’s the glitch: The closer we think we are to earning the reward, the more dopamine our brain releases, and the more we’ll be motivated to work. But if we think the reward is a long way off, dopamine doesn’t get released, our motivation is squelched, and we end up procrastinating. Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19040_5-personality-flaws-that-science-will-cure-in-our-lifetime.html#ixzz1FGQJG2UR
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