I'm back at home after a few weeks of whirlwind travel, visiting relatives. I went to visit a cousin for a few days in Florida, and a few days after I got back, my husband and I drove about eight hours to visit his cousins on the Gulf coast, cousins he had gotten back in touch with after 50 years. I actually wrote about them coming to join our family on Thanksgiving last year, how he had not seen them since he was ten years old, and how upset I was over the fact that another relative wanted to provide a perfect picture of our family to people we didn't even know:

We’re Not a Sit-Com Family... (despite how perfect you want us to be)

On a side note, I have to tell you that these cousins are probably the best family surprise we've had in a long time. My husband and I have struggled to find retired people our age, who enjoy the same things we do, want to be active, and have a wide range of things they like to do ranging from outdoor activities to pub crawls. These cousins are warm, genuine, and very gracious, down-to-earth folks. They'd only met us that one time at Thanksgiving but still invited us to visit them. I normally don't feel comfortable staying at people's homes, preferring the privacy of a hotel, but I enjoyed being at their home. When I wrote that post last year, cranky, whiny, me would have never imagined that we would find some kindred souls in those cousins. 

Now we are back from our trip (recovering from pickleball shoulder pain) and our enormous, overwhelming bike trip is staring us in the face. We are leaving in early May and had not booked the airfare, not yet paid for the bike tour, had a pile of lumber sitting on the deck to be hauled to my brother-in-law's house, another pile of new lumber waiting to replace old deck boards on our deck, and I had a bunch of people to contact. I was feeling that panicky thing where you have a lot to do but don't know what to do first. 

I also have some guilt as I have not been to the gym in a few weeks due to travel. Additionally, we played pickleball with the cousins while we were visiting, and my shoulder has been so painful that lifting my arm straight up in front of me was pretty agonizing these last few days, so I felt I should give it a rest. It's much better after a few days of aspirin and coddling it, so hopefully I can get back to working out at the gym today.

The sad reality is that most of the things on my list have been on my list for a long time. I've just put them off for no apparent reason. Maybe I wanted my husband to take the initiative and be the main motivator to do them. Maybe I just didn't feel like dealing with it. Yesterday that stopped. I realized that if I didn't get the ball rolling on these tasks (which maybe I think are more important than he does), that we'd be scrambling at the last minute to get them done before we were gone for almost a month. So, finally, yesterday, I decided I was going to attack my mental "to do" list with a vengeance. I told my husband to call his brother and see where he wanted us to put those boards because today, we were moving them that day. Those 12-foot boards had to be moved because if a tornado or strong windstorm came along and we were not home, those boards could end up being flying debris and my police officer neighbor would not be happy with them bashing into his house, given the way the storms usually blow through our yard. I reached out to the travel agent we decided to use for this trip and got the airline tickets for our bike trip (air travel fares are insane these days....) and talked to her about logistics regarding our bike tour travel. We got the boards moved, got invited to lunch while we were at my brother-in-law's, and unloaded all the boards. I took care of a few other tasks that were nagging me, too. 

I cannot tell you how much lighter I felt later that day. In fact, I found several smaller tasks around the house to do as well, and the feeling just stayed with me. I felt accomplished, productive and energized. All because I did a few things. Now, I look out the back door onto our deck and I don't see a giant pile of old deck boards that need to be moved. I have my chicken breast in the freezer that I cooked up yesterday, so I know I have diet food. My airline tickets are purchased, laundry got folded and put away and my shoulder is much better today. 

I have to tell you that relieving the burden that was weighing on me about those tasks felt far greater than relaxing and ignoring them. I'm beginning to think that having all these tasks hanging over my head was depressing me. I learned at my job that it was best to do the thing you hate the most first, because then the other tasks don't seem so bad. Yesterday, that task was loading all those boards on our truck, driving them to my brother-in-law's house and unloading them. Once that was done, all the other tasks seemed easy. Note that the photo above is after all the 20 to 30 boards had been hauled off. 

If you are feeling over-burdened with stuff to do, crank up your motivation, and get the most daunting/difficult task done first. You will be surprised at how much better your mood will be once you accomplish that one difficult task. Even if you can't get it done all at once, make a dent in it and make sure you acknowledge to yourself how much you actually got accomplished, not how much you didn't get accomplished.  

Any great feeling you can generate without using food to achieve it is a win!

(photo courtesy of 7th Decade Readhead)