So as you might have noticed, lately I’m having this feeling of cleansing, and letting-go. Of emptiness (the good kind.)

This is the funny thing about keeping a blog. Here I think I’m writing about all of this random stuff, and then when I go back and look I see all these connections, which might as well be written in neon lights and doing tap-dance routines they’re so obvious.

Today it occurred to me that the blissy emptiness came over me right around the same time I started building my sailboat. Actually, before I even realized I wanted to call it a sailboat.

In case you’re not following along with all of my wacky metaphors, the sailboat is my schedule. Building the sailboat is me intentionally deciding how to spend my time, but in a way that’s not overplanned and crazy-stifling.

The constant guilt of Not Doing

It’s hard to give a summary of the giant soup in my brain on go-go-go, but one huge issue for me was that there were so many disparate types of things I wanted to be doing…

Big Stuff
These would be ideas for creative projects that I want to be doing, things that inspire me. They require long un-interrupted (by others, or by my churning guilt-ridden brain) stretches of time, but don’t have set times so they’re easy to put off.

Practice Stuff
Stuff that I want to put into practice over time. Things like dance of shiva, meditation, and long walks with the dog. These I would ideally do daily, or at least on a very regular basis. They do generally require a certain amount of time, but don’t have set times. (While it’s tempting to manufacture set times, if I write “8:00 meditate” on my calendar that just about guarantees the last thing I’ll be doing at 8 is meditating.)

Work Stuff
These are generally tasks that bring in money. They aren’t tied to a set time or an amount of time per se, but they usually have to be completed by a set time. The amount of time these tasks take can vary greatly, since work can be done much more quickly when I am in the right frame of mind.

Appointments
Sometimes I have to be at a certain place at a certain time because I have planned to meet someone. In my life right now these are phone appointments, pilates, and social events.

Errands
These tend to be tied to a certain place but not necessarily a certain time (though some errands are appointments too, these are by no means definitive categories). The amount of time can also vary greatly depending on when I do them. If I go to the grocery store at 11am on a weekday it can take half the time (not to mention irritation) of going at 5pm.

Maintenance
These are things I need to keep on top of, that also don’t need to happen at a certain time but I would like for them to happen at regular intervals. Stuff like opening my mail or doing laundry. In this category I also include making phone calls to friends and family members. These tasks also vary greatly in the amount of time they take. Although they’re easy to put off, they are much faster and smoother when done on a regular basis.

My previous “method”

Okay, it wasn’t so much a method as paper-shuffling with a side of ongoing, persistent guilt.

My calendar would keep track of appointments, but whenever I would over-plan and add practice or maintenance or big stuff onto my calendar I would rebel against it.

My to-do list was just a shapeless blob and felt so weighty, even when I tried to categorize it. It was always like here are all these things I should be doing nownownow. But without carving out time to do them a lot of stuff never got done, or only got done when it became an emergency (which creative projects never do but paying the cell phone bill sure does.)

And don’t even get me started on quality of life type stuff I wanted to be able to enjoy, like spending time with my husband, and other non-guiltified Not Doing.

I know there are a lot of systems out there that address these shortcomings.
But since my eyes glaze over whenever someone starts to talk about details I never got into the swing of any existing time-management-systems. I literally can’t get through reading about them.

Retro-fitting someone else’s solution onto my life also didn’t work for me because I’m too much of a rebel against structure.

So in order to even start to be able to pay attention to this type of detail, I had to make the process into a giant life adventure. Like building a sailboat.

Anyway, I have a sailboat now. And it’s creating all of this space and ease for me. So I’m going to write a little bit about how I built it in my next post or two.

If you’re building your own <insert metaphor here>, I’d love to hear how it’s going.

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Since I moved in to my husband’s house in Seattle, we have been slowly painting and decorating every room.

Actually, it’s pretty generous to say “we.” I mean, I have been picking out colors and he has been painting (when one of you is not so good with details they’re probably not the one who should be attacking 100-year-old walls with a paintbrush.)

Anyway, yeah, I’m lucky.

But I try to help when I can.

Which is why when we moved the oven away from the wall in the kitchen and uncovered the horrors dwelling underneath, I volunteered for cleanup duty.

The oven couldn’t be moved too far from the wall since the gas line was still attached, so I had to climb into this teeny-tiny space behind it. There were cabinets overhead so I couldn’t even stand up once I was back there.

There was maybe 5 inches of space on all sides of me. I had to squat, and contort sideways and backwards in order to clean everything. The walls behind the range, the floor tile, the side of the cabinet where the range had been…

And as I was simple-greening and scraping away the oozing brown crud it occurred to me, yet again. Oh.

Here I am cleaning away layers of old stuff.

Just like on my computer.

Just like in my body.

Legacy-type stuff. Stuff so old I don’t really know how it got here.

Last year was all about drastic moves, deep course corrections. Go go going.

And all I seem to be doing this year, intentional or not, is creating emptiness. And I mean scrub-brushed, sparklingly-empty emptiness.

Stillness.

Peace.

Getting at the stuff long buried and giving it a good scraping. In the most gentle, easy way. No struggle, simply eliminating what I don’t need.

Oh, and finding freaking metaphors everywhere.

(I mean, hello, it’s kind of annoying.)

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There are so many different kinds of empty.

There is what I call the depressed, lumpy-throat empty-feeling. That piercing, heavy kind of empty.

When I felt this, I found myself inside of the emptiness, as if it had swallowed me. Like I could try my hardest, I could keep throwing my pathetic tiny pebbles out into this enormous cavern, but they would never pile high enough to let me find my way out.

Oh, emptiness. When you are a synonym for hopelessness, darkness and lost-ness you are my old friend.

And yet when I say now, I feel empty, I’m not talking about you.

The emptiness I feel now is inside of me, I’m not inside of it.

Right now, I’m immovable.

I’m feeling looseness and calmness where there used to be grasping. It is like the tingly feeling that is left behind when releasing a weight. Not just acceptance, but beyond that, to a letting-go.

An opening for what comes next.

Even my goals from just last month have shifted. Or not shifted so much as untied, and dropped away. Like I can’t imagine holding something so tightly.

How strange to feel such an enormous shift in less than a month. How bizarre to return to the page and find everything different.

And here I find my old friend and inspiration, contradiction. Because this kind of emptiness could only come when I feel at my most full.

I’m disoriented, but in such a gentle way.

{I could wrap this up into a box and tie it with a string to “babymaking” or “raw foods” or even clearing off my hard drive. But this is just a glimmer of something I had during meditation and I really don’t know where it’s going. So as Goddess Leonie would say, “the end.” Oh, and P.S. do you ever feel anything like this?}

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In addition to being really bad at details, I am like the least computer-savvy excuse for a “computer person.”

Side note: I’ll write a post about my strengths someday, I swear. Although I suppose that would make for less interesting blog fodder. (“I was really awesome at this thing and it went smoothly, the end.”)

So anyway, yes, technically I’m a web designer and can have intelligent conversations about content management systems, and server technologies and blah blah blah.

But when my computer throws a “scratch disc full” error at me I want to rend garments in frustration.

I might as well just confess right here that each time I have gotten a new computer for the past decade I just copied everything over. No archive, no backup system. Zero sense of organization whatsoever. Folders within folders, each successive one labeled “_new.”

So since my computer literally refused to save anything more, I was forced to sort through my hard drive this past week. Slowly uncovering layers upon layers of used up memory.

(Yeah, it’s a metaphor. I see that now. I seriously didn’t until I sat down to write this post though. Oh how I crack myself up.)

How Memory Works

If you watch a digital movie, you’re more or less in that moment again.

If you open an IM transcript, you’re in that conversation again.

And the thing is, in the year 2010, a lot of “old” stuff is preserved this way. In almost too rich detail.

Backup

While I (sort of) accept my past and everything that got me to where I am today (yawn), I don’t exactly want to re-live it. So much of it was so pointlessly painful.

It’s like this really depressing artsy movie that has a great “message.”

I learned a lot from it, my life is better for it, but I sure as hell don’t need to rewind and watch it again.

At the same time I felt this burden, like how can I erase part of the past? As if there were some sort of archival integrity I would be disrupting by clearing this stuff out.

Anyway, here’s what I did.
I archived a sampling. (Pretty much anything where I look pretty or sound clever.) But mostly, I deleted it.

I need that space for new stuff.

But I’m curious…

What do you do with it?

I mean, the stuff that’s old enough to capture a moment in time that’s no longer current, but maybe isn’t the happiest memory.

Do you keep it all?

Or do you have some rules about what you keep and what you don’t?

Oh, and if you do keep it–do you ever look at it again?

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