Overwhelm is such a tempting canyon to wander into. That’s my only excuse. Given the lack of external obligations, there is no reason I should ever end up there. The only reason I do so is because it is a fairground, a marketplace, a valley full of natural beauty and wonder. It smells delicious, like candyfloss and toffee-apples, alternating with sizzling onions and Bratwurst. It tinkles like wind-chimes, in harmony with robin song and mountain stream. It is peopled by philosophers and poets. And it keeps laying the welcome mat at my feet.
The only reason I ever end up in Overwhelm is because I’m pretty rubbish at saying No. Every day something pops up in front of me and I’m a three-year-old jumping up and down and pulling on a parent’s hand: Can I Dad? Can I?
Only I’m not three and Dad’s long dead and there’s no-one to say no on my behalf.
This isn’t about me being a people pleaser and saying yes to help other people out. This is me getting excited about opportunities, about all the things I could do for myself. Brilliant things. Helpful things. Enlightening, educating, developmental, growth things. And, ok, fun things. Things I want to do.
Because when I smell sizzling onions and sausages – even metaphorical ones – I’m a dog Pavlov would be proud of.
When a monthly newsletter from a writer-friend lands in my inbox with her latest offering of a poetry course, I have to physically delete it before I say yes. I know from experience just how fabulous her courses are. I also know that I have a tendency to get bogged down in them because I have haven’t figured out how to filter the smorgasbord she gives us. (Apology for the mixed metaphor. You know what I mean.) I also know that, right now, I do not have the time to commit to even a fraction of what she would place in front of me. My project list is long enough.
I have to delete without allowing time for thought because it’s a double-no: no to supporting someone’s business that I want to support, and no to benefitting from her amazing insights. But no it must be. Walk away from the stall.
I spot an advert for Swanwick…and I hear the tinkle of a distant Peak District stream. No! Yes I could, but No I must not. Not this year.
January is a difficult month for learning to say No because inboxes and magazines and just the post-through-the-letterbox junk mail are all full of special offers, and sign-up-for-this-or-that stuff. A couple of friends are doing ‘Dry January’ – and they have my deep respect – and I am not joining in. Saying no to wine is probably a-ways down my list yet. It shouldn’t be. It should be at the top but, hey, we can only do what we can do.
Writing courses and workshops (writing and physical and spiritual ones) are actually at the top of my list. It feels counter-intuitive to be saying no and, in some cases, even unsubscribing from the email list that brings them my way is painful, but I need to learn that doing so – saying No to these things – is saying Yes to the projects already in hand. Yes to giving myself time and focus.
I know that every time we make a choice to include something, we either exclude something else or
at the very least make it more difficult. Every time we say Yes to something, we are saying No to something else.
What I’ve not yet learned is how to turn that insight around. Every time I say No to something I am saying Yes to something else – a something else that I have already committed to, a something else that already matters.
My gremlins are growling. They are in full yes-but mode. It’s ok, I stroke them gently, there will be other times, just not this year. This is my get-out-of-jail-free card. When I say No, it’s rarely a permanent, not-ever, not-in-this-lifetime No. It’s more of a Not-yet, Not-today, Not-this-time kind of thing. A Maybe-later, Maybe-next-time thing.
That isn’t about kicking the can down the road; it’s about living in the present. Many of the things I am now saying No to, will come around again. And if they don’t, that will also be ok. And if they do, I might continue to say No, or it might then be the time to say Yes.
~
This year of simplifying has to be a year of saying no to things (for now).
- No to unnecessary purchases.
- No to new writing courses.
- No to travelling every month.
- No to gigs that don’t immediately fire me up.
- No to whatever permission I inadvertently gave people to clutter up my inbox. (Unsubscribe everything!)
- No to obsessing over when I last submitted anything (just make sure it was sometime
this month). - No to getting annoyed with people (yes to walking away).
But also No to not changing my mind. I said No to growing potatoes. I'm reconsidering that one.
~
Learning to say No, is also about learning to say Yes.
On a January Saturday when I feel I “should” be doing a whole host of other stuff, I say Yes to staying with ‘reading’. I read the latest edition of Resurgence magazine. I read to the end of There Are Rivers in the Sky. I spend hours with other people’s words rather than writing my own. I remember a friend telling me during lockdown that “you can only read for so long”. At the time, I remember thinking: “yes, but so long can actually be hours and hours,” or as it turned out: a whole day. I wanted to be doing other things, but saying No to them enabled me to stay in story-time…in story-telling (both real and fictional and the interface between the two)…saying No to chores and adventures and whatever else I might have done with the day meant I could say yes to a deeply spiritual space accessed through both real-world-real-time journalism and history-based novelistic retelling of things that are both made-up and true. Both of those things seemed to simultaneously enrich me and depress me. Let’s say: they made me think about the world and about my place within it. I am choosing to believe that’s a good thing.
I am still learning.
