the dark side of complexity - a mindful musing

Short on time? Scroll down to the TL;DR version

Happy good day 💟

Today I’m writing with explosive amounts of gratitude because I experienced a momentous day on Saturday: I took my daughter on our first national park adventure together, complete with official national park passports!

I’ve wanted to do this even before I was a parent, so to witness this dream evolve to include my daughter and to live it through to fruition is all the things I thought it was going to be and then some.

To be honest, this trip has been on the procrastination burner for a few years now, and it only happened because (with help) I made it super simple — simpler than I ever would have thought possible.

Share time. Pull up a seat 🛋️

Ever since my daughter was born, I’ve had a very hard go at doing things that are outside the normal scope of our everyday (and also things within that scope). Adding in day adventures or big outings has been a huge stressor for me and it always feels like a super big debacle.

Don’t get me wrong — I WANT to do the things. It’s just that I’ve more often felt that I CAN’T do them or anticipated that the stress of all the things will actually break me, and I can’t afford that as a human, let alone as a single parent.

And while I know I shouldn’t, I feel ashamed and very vulnerable sharing this —  because parental guilt to infinity 🙄

Avoiding things because they feel too big or beyond my capacity has been a big plague on my parenthood experience — my whole life really. I’ve often not felt like I think other people feel — happy and lucky to spend time with lots of people and be on the go and do all the things at any given time and have a good time doing it. That description has rarely fit me (and I don’t know it actually fits others, but that’s for another time and space).

The deal is that the anxiety I get about doing the thing and thinking about all the prep or potential things that could go wrong are exhausting for my person, so it feels easiest and safest to not do the things because to think about doing them feels like the end of the world, and then if they don’t end up like I’d like them to, it instantly translates in my brain to “I’m some kind of failure”, and the bigger snowball effect commences. Trauma brain takes command.

Are you familiar? 🫂

So I brought this to therapy, and my amazing therapist has been helping me work through it to prepare myself and essentially shrink the planning process down to the bare minimum. My game plan was to come up with the smallest, easiest adventure that would count (in my mind) as visiting a national park.

The solution? Going to the closest national park to us (shoutout to Cuyahoga Valley National Park), picking a specific date, creating a VERY small menu of activity options that my daughter could pick from, and accepting before we went that anything could not work out at any time and we could just come home.

To recap the plan:

• Proximity/ease

• A specific date

• A small amount of options

• Acceptance that it all might go to hell

A very simple plan.

And let me tell you how badass I feel that this worked!

But it wasn’t easy. Simplicity takes a lot of work when that’s not what you’re used to, and this was not the typical simplicity I’ve been working with. This took a lot of time, energy, practice, and mindfulness. It was a long game.

I had to keep checking myself to not plan too much, to notice intruding anticipatory thoughts, to redirect myself when my negative internal voice wanted to scream “you can’t do this!”, and to breathe and let some light in.

And it turned the volume on some big anxieties waaaaay down, so I had capacity to turn the excitement dial up 📻

I lived a dream, my daughter had fun (and learned some cool stuff), we took some awkward photos and made some good memories, and since I didn’t feel some insurmountable level of stress, I was able to stay present and flexible to meet both our needs.

That’s what I call a hot mindful time 🔥

So what’s the TL;DR version?

• My brain has superpowers to make things way too complicated and tries to plan for every single possible variation and contingency of any event, and it feels like I will break in a thousand pieces.

• I identified this habit by working with my supportive therapist.

• Together we defined parameters for a minimal experience and built a simple plan so I could make it happen.

• I used mindfulness to check in with myself up to and during the event.

• The event happened and it was wonderful!

Rinse and repeat for other adventures 🏕️

So my offering for you to muse over today (besides this very long anecdotal saga) is to get curious about where simplifying to the barest level might help you experience more and with more presence.

I’d love to hear if you’ve experimented with this already, or if you decide to try it out. Let’s learn these magnificent ways together! Hit reply or message me on the social  medias 💌

Until tomorrow’s new moon, with much love and good energy 💚

photo credit: yours truly :)