Do What You Can, Not What You Can't
25 Things I Did When I Didn't Know What to Do
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In the midst of what has felt like an impossible month (so far), I’ve been asking myself some questions that perhaps are familiar to you as well: How can I make dinner when people just an hour from my house have no electricity or maybe even no house in the aftermath of a tropical storm? How can we celebrate a birthday on this atrocious anniversary of destruction? How can I show up for work when another hurricane threatens massive destruction just two weeks after the last one?
The simple answer is that we must. Not callously, not insensitively, but we cannot freeze joy. When we do, we freeze our empathy, too.
I’ve been celebrating Kendra Adachi’s new book, The Plan: Manage Your Time Like a Lazy Genius. I sat down with her to talk for nearly an hour about my favorite part of the book, where she submits we consider not only our schedule but also our energy when we plan our days.
If we wake up feeling particularly energetic, we can plan our day accordingly based on the TODAY framework: Tricky, Optional, Delightful, Active, Yes. But if we wake up feeling as though you don’t have much to give, there’s a TODAY framework for that, too: Tender, Output, Delegate, Accept, Yes.
Check out this week’s episode to hear all about both of those frameworks.
In the ebb and flow of our regular lives, our energy naturally fluctuates. But when you add loss and grief and hurricanes and an election season on top of that, it can feel fully impossible to do anything at all, even just our next right thing.
The heartache will always be here, arriving without any effort. But the joy, the hope, and the help? They have to come from us on purpose.
Here are 25 things I did this week when I didn’t know what else to do. Making this list was life-giving for me. Maybe making your own will be, too.