I Should Be Doing Something

I spend far too much time thinking about things I should be doing. This is a fruitless and often painful activity, but I continue to indulge in it. Why?

Well. My thought processes are not uniform. A whole committee of voices participates in my decision-making, and they pull in opposing directions. For example, I have a childish member who really enjoys thumbing her nose at the others, saying "Nyah, nyah. You can't make me. So there." An older committee member protests that my status as retired means that I don't have to do anything I don't want to.

But many members of the committee feel lazy, guilty, ashamed, and unworthy to live when I'm choosing to read or play games on my devices instead of creating something, taking care of business, reaching out to friends, stretching, or just getting out of the house. Shouldn't feeling that bad outweigh the pleasures of doing my own thing?

Then I look more closely into the members who advocate for inaction, and find one who is shy, another who is slightly agoraphobic, and a third who is convinced that keeping still and silent keeps me from the attention of some great, malign force. That's pretty powerful stuff.

On the third hand, the other committee members feel competent, capable, and energized by getting stuff done. But even they are undercut by the knowledge that most of the stuff will have to be done again not too long from now.

I have confronted the problem of "shoulding" on myself many times in the past, and come up with two ways of coping. One, which rose to the status of a resolution one year, is to view each "should" as having only two possible responses: either do or not do (and let myself off the hook for not doing); there is no leaving it undone while beating myself up for not doing it. The second approach is advice I formulated for myself as a retiree: do as much fun stuff as my body and emotions can handle, and as much good as I need to do to preserve my self-esteem.

The first, Yoda-like, approach calls for moment-by-moment mindfulness. The second calls for planning future activities to balance pleasure and productivity, and then to carry out those plans.

Perfectionism sometimes gets in the way of making plans. Many of my committee members strive so heartily for perfection that they cannot decide what to eat or watch on TV without obsessing. The saner members of my committee frequently have to remind them that at every point in life there are many good enough choices, and no single perfect one. Moreover, any particular choice that seems to be working out badly can usually be abandoned and a different choice made. Very few choices are carved in stone. Each new moment I can do something different. This is not an affirmation or aspiration, but a statement of fact. Being alive and human means having the ability to make different choices. Choices are what living consists of. Every moment is an ocean of possibilities, a sea of opportunities limited only by my imagination.

And maybe that's my problem -- a failure of imagination. My whole career and avocation have been in non-fiction writing. I haven't created characters, worlds, or plots. On the other hand, every now and then I imagine an invention that might be useful, but don't do anything with the idea. Maybe there's an inventors' suggestion box somewhere where I could pass these ideas on to someone who could either realize them or tell me who has already done it.

Then I start to wonder if I should be doing warm-up exercises for my imagination. Or would that just be another way to "should" on myself?