Nearly every person I talk to says something about not having enough of something. Sometimes it is not enough time to do all the things they need to do. Sometimes it’s not enough energy. Sometimes it’s not enough give a #*%&. It can be not enough, for example, time to finish a school assignment, motivation to work on a hobby, money to visit a parent, or energy to play with a child.
This leaves people feeling overwhelmed because, here’s the thing, it’s never just playing with the child or visiting the parent. It’s playing with the child and washing the dishes, and picking up the toys, and doing the laundry, and making lunch, and deciding what to make for lunch, and getting groceries to make the food, and getting dressed, and getting the child dressed, and changing the child after they get covered in whatever muck they find to play in and etc. And the “and’s” don’t stop!
Your therapist tells you to breathe. Skills like this help you to recenter and to let go of all of it for a minute. However, when you come back to the thoughts of what you need to do it all comes right back.
Time to conquer the mountain. Does the person jump to the top in one leap? Remember we’re talking about a regular human being like you and me, not a superhero who regularly leaps tall buildings in a single bound.
Not happening!
But climbing onto the first rock is manageable. From there to the second is the same, if not even easier. Focusing on the one rock right in front of you allows you to move forward.
And it doesn’t really matter if you get to the top or not, but if that’s what you want, then you can get there. Whether it happens today or on another day. Every mountain is climbed only one step at a time.
There are also many tasks that we break down into steps and do the first one, but then can’t take any more steps until something else happens. We might have to wait for another person to do something or wait for something we started to reach a specific point. It is ok to set it down and come back to it later when there is another step we can take.