narrow the options

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Mandy Brown wrote, in Too Much and not enough:

Once you accept (or re-accept) that there is too much, it becomes easier to turn some things away. You may still feel grief or loss at the things you cannot do. You may feel guilt, especially if an institution or person benefits from you feeling that way. But accepting that you must leave some things undone shifts the problem from one of *being not enough* to one of *being in a position to make choices*. And even when those choices are coupled to difficult or prickly constraints, they are still choices.

Deciding to do something means deciding to not do all the other things. If you walk west, you’re deciding not to walk east, or north, or south.

Faced with this realization, a comfortable place to land is in the paralysis of inaction. There’s an allure to the infinite choices available before a decision is made: having limitless possibilities in the air is intoxicating; why not just stay there.

This phenomenon is at play in me, in matters big and small, every day. Writing down a list of things I’ll commit to doing today is a powerful route to productivity, but it means leaving off all the other things. So why not just do nothing!

This was all very much in the air this week, and so, mindful of Brown’s advice that “you must leave some things undone,” I created myself a reminder that sometimes the way forward is to narrow the options.

I’ve printed a limited edition of 14, and they are for sale in the Queen Square Press shop.