You come home with groceries and start making dinner. You’re tired, the counter is covered with things you haven’t put away, and the sink is full from earlier.
You take out a cutting board, but there isn’t really anywhere to put it. You move a few things. Something falls over. You realize the pan you need is still dirty. Dinner suddenly feels like a much bigger undertaking than it did when you bought the ingredients.
You could keep going. None of this makes cooking impossible. Instead, you stop for a minute.
You put the groceries away. You wash the pan and clear enough of the counter to have somewhere to work. Then you sit down for ten minutes before coming back.
You’re still tired when you start again. Dinner still has to be made. But now there’s room for the cutting board, the pan is ready, and you’re no longer trying to cook in the middle of everything else.
Sometimes making something more doable is that ordinary.
We tend to notice the thing we’re having difficulty with and assume that is where the difficulty has to be solved. If making dinner feels like too much, we need to find more energy. If a task is overwhelming, we need to push ourselves through it. If we can’t concentrate, we need to concentrate harder.
But the task is only part of what we’re dealing with. There is also everything we’re asking ourselves to do it within.
So before trying to become more capable of handling the situation, it can be worth asking a smaller question:
What would make this more doable?
Not what would make it effortless. Not what would make you want to do it. Just what could change about the situation that would make doing it a little less difficult.
Sometimes there may be nothing you can change.
But sometimes there’s a dirty pan and nowhere to put the cutting board.