There’s A Reason Your Projects Aren’t Getting Done During Quarantine (and no, it’s not because you’re lazy)
So we are how far into quarantine now……? I don’t know, I’ve lost all track of time. What I do know is that in the beginning I thought, Oh goody, I’ll finally get all of those back-burnered projects done! I was super excited to finish painting my gazebo, organize that trunk of photos into albums, do a deep clean on the house, and try out some new baking recipes. Now, a vague number of weeks later, I have not done a single one of those things. I have read and gardened and taken walks. But I haven’t done any of the “productive” things I was determined to accomplish. I’m observing the part of my mind that is programmed to do! complete! succeed! and how it wants to chastise me for not being productive enough.
As I’ve talked with friends, I’m hearing a similar thread run throughout the conversations. It’s usually some version of this: I thought I would get all this stuff done in all this down time but I haven’t done much of anything; I feel so unmotivated and lazy. There is an undercurrent of self-judgment pulling us down as we grapple with what we think we SHOULD be doing versus what we are actually doing (or not doing as the case may be).
There’s a reason why we aren’t being as productive as we’d hoped and it’s an important one. We have just been given a massive global reset and one we desperately need. We have been out of balance for a long time and we are now being given a golden opportunity to re-establish balance within ourselves. That doesn’t look like a quarantine version continuation of our accomplishment driven patterns. It looks like rest, reflection, allowing, breathing. For the first time in modern human history we are not being asked to do. We are allowed to be. We have been given the space to feel. To heal. To assess our relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
So when my friends (or my own narratives) say they feel bad about themselves because they had all kinds of productive tasks lined up to accomplish during quarantine but they haven’t done anything because they are exhausted or sad or agitated I say to them, Hooray! I think you’re right on track! Your nervous system doesn’t give a shit about your shelves being built! It desperately wants you to address this exhaustion, sadness and agitation. Be with all of that. Be with the self, as it is, not as you think it should be. You might tell me you stayed in your sweat pants all day and watched Netflix and didn’t get any work done. And I am going to say, I think you ARE doing the work.
The world is changing and the human consciousness is trying to evolve; we are being given a chance to align with that more consciously. It’s not going to happen by cleaning out our closets or organizing the garage. It will happen when we finally stop and really sit with ourselves, without reaching for distraction, and determine who we are, what matters to us, and what we truly want out of our lives going forward — not from a space of what we’ve been taught or trained to believe, but from a space of what feels right.
Every single one of us is getting a reset. That will look different for each individual. We are each getting the chance to receive what we need. Sleep, rest, journaling, artistic pursuits, staring at the trees. It’s a chance to check into our being, underneath all that doing.
When we start to feel into what we really want, we might discover that from that space the things we are called to do has less about to do with tackling projects that make us feel accomplished (ergo, worthy). We might end up reading a novel, puttering in the garden, or just laying on the couch and watching all umpteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy (guilty). We get to address all the things we actually WANT to do, things that we have buried under the narrative of what we SHOULD do. And we get to address — and release— all the judgment we heap on ourselves for doing what we actually want.
Most of us have been taught that our worth is attached to what we are doing and how we are contributing. We get a HUGE opportunity here to reset that pattern and retrain our brain to understand that our worth is inherent. We are just as worthy laying in a heap on the couch eating popcorn as we are in a power suit closing the deal.
Sure, shit needs to get done. Bills need to get paid. I’m not talking about letting the laundry pile up for months in exchange for eating pork rinds on the living room rug in your jammies for days on end (but fyi if you did choose to do that you’d still be just as worthy. However, what you truly want is probably clean clothes and paid bills and some semblance of movement in your life). I’m talking about restructuring the mind patterns that tell us we are a piece of shit if we dare sit on the couch and eat potato chips versus doing something “productive”.
We have this amazing chance right now to re-train our minds to function from a space of what feels right versus what we “should” be doing. This is the perfect time to practice that re-patterning before going back into the world and putting it into action. No, it doesn’t mean running amok like kindergarteners in some hedonistic, self-centered manner with utter disregard for others. It means we can begin to understand how to operate from a space of authenticity, versus functioning blindly from ingrained programs we have been taught to follow in an effort to feel valuable and worthy — a shift that ultimately benefits the whole.
We can’t live our best life, our most authentic life, from old habituated patterns of external validation and “should” driven actions. This is the chance to break those habits. This is the chance where we get to stop and ask ourselves, ‘Is this(or that) what I really want in my life?’. We get to pause, to breathe, to change the cycles that have kept us unfulfilled. That may show up in bursts of creative ideas, it may show up in the need to do nothing and be ‘lazy’. It doesn’t matter. What matters is we listen to what our bodies are asking us to do. We can then begin to re-wire our mental patterns to align with being instead of doing. If we do this, if we allow ourselves to dive into our hearts and souls and excavate what is really trying to come to light, we might be able to re-emerge into a world that flows instead of grinds, that feels more connected than divisive. Then our doing will come from a radically different — and more balanced — space.
We might actually be able to come back to the world in a way that is kinder, more compassionate and more collaborative. We might come back in a way that continues to allow nature to heal, rather than resuming our pattern of destruction and pollution.
This is our chance. Never before has the world JUST STOPPED. There’s a reason for that. We need it now. We are being called to heal and to align with a higher vibration of authenticity. The question remains: will we answer the call? Only if we listen to what is stirring within us right now. Only if we stop forcing and start allowing. Which is probably miles from what we expected to accomplish during this “time out”. There will be a time to finish all those projects you thought quarantine would knock out. Contrary to what most of us thought, this isn’t that time. It is not time for more doing. We have be “doing” ourselves into a frenzied, neurotic, imbalanced mess. Time now to re-balance, re-calibrate, reacquaint ourselves with our hearts and souls and to establish new agendas, new thought patterns, new relationships with ourselves and the world. Time now to heal. This is our cocoon time. May we use it wisely so we can re-emerge as our most authentic selves and move ourselves forward in more meaningful ways.
