Plan Be: Surviving Winter

I've been on sabatical since just before Thanksgiving.  Until then I had been writing a daily blog, dutifully getting up hours before dawn to post a fresh article before I started my day job at the pool store.  It was a lot of work, but it was a wonderful run!  I was energized and enthused.  I learned things as I wrote, and I grew quite a bit as a result of practicing what I was learning.   My life was flourishing, like a tropical garden in midsummer.  And then came winter, and suddenly I found myself completely exhausted.

The Wisdom of Doing Nothing

Sometimes, the most productive thing that we can do is to do nothing at all.

We are always in such a hurry to do the next thing, especially those of us with dreams and ambitions and goals. We've got some place to go, and we know that the only way to get there is to keep making progress. So we push on. My brother and I have a saying about this that cracks us up. It is a syllogism, an illogical statement couched in terms of logic:

I must do something.

This is something.

Therefore, I must do this.

 Sure, it's easy to laugh now, while you're sipping coffee in your big puffy chair; but when you're in the midst of a critical moment, when you're just certain that what you do next will make or break you, it's easy to forget that sometimes it really is better to do nothing at all.