Don't Wait for The Perfect Moment
In Reluctant Support of Consistency
My whole life, the spaces I’ve dwelled in have been complete dumpster fires. I went to boarding school, and I have a memory of some of the teachers who lived in my dorm viewing me as a perfect student until they saw the insides of my room, papers strewn across the floor.
We also had surprise room inspections, where you’d be forced to stay inside the dorm after dinner if you failed them too frequently. Rather than make a lifestyle change and become neater, I simply locked the door when I found out the room inspectors were in the room, so they couldn’t come in and fail me. Eventually I got caught, but I was in senior year and rarely went outside at night anyways, so I didn’t care.
I’ve been a sloppy pig, a clutter connoisseur, and across the years, though I occasionally manage to clean the shit off my floor, I inevitably return to being Queen Valerie, ruler of rubble and having dirty clothing all over the place.
About six weeks ago, I got home from work early and had a sudden urge to clean my walk-in closet and actually have it live up to the “walk-in” part of the name. Since I had moved into the apartment over a year ago, I hadn’t been able to step more than a foot into the closet for months and kept getting overwhelmed whenever I thought about fixing it. But for whatever reason, cleaning the closet suddenly seemed approachable, and I found an organization system that I’ve been able to maintain within twenty minutes.
A few days ago, I took the day off work because I felt miserable. At some point during the day, in between feeling like a shoddy corporate bee and wishing I were much more graceful and elegant, I had an inexplicable desire to clean my main room. Surely cleaning my room wasn’t that hard, I thought to myself. I just had to find the right mental move to make everything click into place.
In the case of my room, the mental move came in about ten minutes. Basically, Alex and I purportedly have a corner of the room where we keep laundry and unclassified clothing and unidentified knick-knacks. Except the corner of the room ballooned into half of the room, ballooned into the entire room. The simple realization I had was that I had to get rid of this corner and stick all of my crap into my closet, via numerous hanging shelf organizers from Target.
Boom. 24 years of uncleanliness solved in two miraculous moments gifted from the gods. If you haven’t solved your gaping problems, have you tried doing nothing about it? Who knows, maybe you’ll get somewhere! You might think I’m joking, but I’m really not. I’ve gotten a long way by occasionally saying a funny sentence when the inspiration strikes.
But sometimes the muses don’t sing, the words don’t come. It turns out that profit-making business plans for unicorns don’t reliably come in dreams, no matter how many dream-altering herbs you take. Trust me, I’ve tried! I keep waiting for the “right” moments for inspiration to strike, for myself suddenly to be beautiful and magical and all-knowing, only to find myself sorely disappointed.
I wish I had more patience and presence to be here in my life when things are tough. I know life is a continuous practice, not just a series of miraculous moments of puzzle pieces clicking into place. Recently I asked a very successful friend who works with successful podcast creators about the secret to audience growth, and he told me that the highest order bit is consistency. There are hacks, but really you have to keep showing up. Makes sense, but damn am I annoyed with it!
At the same time though, I do notice myself being less annoyed with things taking a long time than I used to be. Today I was flailing at work and feeling completely lost, and I could’ve shat on myself and gone down a hole of self-hatred, but decided to do twenty minutes of yoga instead. A trivial intervention for someone else, but a miraculous one for me. Life is a practice, after all. You lose a lot when you only go for the life-changing moments.
HI FRIENDS! I’ve been MIA in part because I’ve been on retreat without wi-fi, in part because I got way too in my head to write. I talked to
today about writing and the writing groups that the folks at Foster offer. I’ve infused some of his insights into this post. They’re offering free writing groups called Authoring Circles. If that speaks to you, I recommend applying!