Worry less about the rest.
I don’t remember the pointless thought I had that inspired this, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have a lot of thoughts like this, mostly when I’m going to bed, and they take on great importance.
My bedside notebook these days is a “self-care workbook” I got through signing up for a 6-month Professional Wild Woman group. Yes, I am professionally wild. (Get your shots or beware.) The workbook has 4-5 questions to answer upon waking and upon getting into bed. I use the extra white space to capture the thoughts I don’t want to lose, such as:
- I feel comfortable being utterly myself around N., therefore he is welcome in my home any time. That’s all it takes to be welcome.
- Torn between intensely, impossibly high standards and forsaking your destiny. A gap. A grey area where reality occurs.
- They have penises. I know plenty of people with penises who aren’t very good at it. Not good at penises?
- The Theater Hypothesis: Testing Approaches to Connecting with Audiences
- Just because it’s good, and good for me, doesn’t mean I’ll be able to believe correctly.
- Burp-lesque, or, Borborygmi & Eructation for the Ecdysiast
- That’s a Yes, Roger, and Don’t Call Me Shirley
Though I sometimes seem to discover an odd truth at the point when I’m about to fall asleep, I kinda wish I had more one-liners. I could make all sorts of bumper stickers and buttons and t-shirts and coffee mugs. But the kind of truth I’m looking to create is a bit longer and deeper than one line.
That’s one of the reasons I’m writing every day: to create a kind of truth. Every so often, I feel a truth land in my head and come out my mouth, and I see I’ve consolidated knowledge that seems worth sharing. That doesn’t happen every day, even when I’m deliberately digging a deeper well. Some days, the big goal or life plan is elusive. Um, okay, most days it is. When I get off track, often find a source of wisdom from S., who himself prefers one-liners to deep and craggy truths. If he didn’t say to do fewer pointless things and worry about less about the remaining things, he would certainly wear it on a t-shirt.
If he wore t-shirts with sayings on them.