Tammy Letherer If you’ve ever been laid low by illness or injury, you know how frustrating it is to lie there thinking of all the things you should be doing. You plan how you’ll “catch up.” You make a lot of promises to yourself. Once I feel better, I’ll exercise. I’ll cook more. I’ll go to the beach and sit in the sand. And I’ll balance that with being super productive. I’ll write every day. I’ll do the dishes!
Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ve spent a good deal of time lately being humbled by the reality that this human machine I travel in sometimes needs a major reboot. Humbled both by the mysterious, intricate workings of the body and the fact that I’m not always in control of it.
So in a moment of frustration and helplessness, I decided to ask the unseen force that was “doing this to me” what it wanted me to know. And I heard these words:
Do what you can, when you can.
That seems so refreshingly simple. I’ve started repeating it to myself every time I start to feel the pressure of deadlines and to-dos.
More importantly, I’ve applied it to my writing, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to pursue a creative endeavor.
Because here’s the curse of being a creative: creativity involves vision and big-picture thinking and doesn’t necessarily like to be bothered with pesky details or limitations.
Your visionary (a.k.a. your perfectionist) scoffs at baby steps:
How can I be satisfied with writing a paragraph when I’m envisioning a trilogy?
What good is a scribbled note on a napkin when I’ve set up an elaborately organized filing system on my computer?
Why bother writing for fifteen minutes when I made a commitment to do an hour?
When your visionary is really pissed off, it gets more whiny: Even if I finish the book, I won’t know how to get it published.
But here’s another harsh reality creativity doesn’t like: if you don’t do what you can, when you can, you’ll never finish. You’ll never reach your goal. You’ll be like the scores of people who talk about their dreams without taking action.
Thankfully, the opposite is also true: by doing what you can, when you can, you will eventually write that book, finish that painting, redecorate that guest bedroom, or plan that vacation.
Or maybe you’ll just do the dishes.
As author Byron Katie puts it, “Doing the dishes is the practice of loving the task in front of you. Your inner voice guides you all day long to do simple things such as brush your teeth, drive to work, call your friend, or do the dishes. Even though it’s just another story, it’s a very short story, and when you follow the direction of the voice, that story ends. We are really alive when we live as simply as that — open, waiting, trusting, and loving to do what appears in front of us now.
Life never gets more difficult than that.”
