The Five Things

A life lesson from a sixth grade teacher

Journal: 11 November, 2024, morning.

What I learned from my 6th grade teacher: when there’s so much work to do that it’s overwhelming, just pick five things and do those five things. Don’t even think about anything but those five things. Just do them. And when you’ve done them? Pick five more things and then do them. Ad infinitum.

It’s not exciting or trendy or glamorous or YouTube worthy but it works.

Small steps are still steps.

Overcoming inertia is the hardest part of any work, and knowing you only have to do five things instead of hundreds of things makes it easier to get started, and once you’re moving you have momentum, the wind at your back, filling your sails, powering you.

Action breeds action. Things get easier. You begin to feel better. Maybe the hundreds of things are still there but your attitude toward them has changed. You can see tangible, visible results, real progress, and tangible, visible, real progress is incredibly motivating.

I have to remind myself of these truths regularly because as long as I’ve been practicing this, I still forget it. That’s just being human. We naturally tend more toward chaos than toward order, and we do much better at accomplishing a goal if we break it down into small parts. That’s just basic project management, and here I smile, realizing that in 6th grade I was being taught effective project management. I embraced that and it has served me well, since everything in life can be approached as a project.

Want to be kinder? More loving? More positive? More organized? More active in community work? More open and receptive to others? A better listener? A better parent? More patient?

All those can be approached as projects.

One of my past desires was to be more reflective and thoughtful and philosophical about my life and myself as a person: who am I, essentially? As I’ve aged, how have I changed? In what ways? Would I consider those changes “good” or “bad” or something outside those definitions? And have even my definitions of those terms changed over my lifetime? Approaching this as a project, I decided to begin a daily journal, simply recording my thoughts about nothing in particular but just whatever came into my mind. At the end of a year of doing this, I will look again at what I wrote about—without a plan or conscious decision—and try to understand why I chose what I chose. What do those choices tell me about myself?

It is a good thing to know and understand ourselves, though what we learn is sometimes hard to accept. That acceptance is also a project, one lasting a lifetime.

It’s fascinating, out of all our experiences, what our mind chooses to retain, to remember. I wonder sometimes if any of the others with me in that 6th grade classroom remember her “five things,” that casual conversational side comment that my mind captured and stored and retains, even to this day.

Moving on now from the “thinking” work to the “doing” work, I will stop here and go begin my five things for today.

I wish you well, friends. Try to have a day that brings you peace at the end of it.

#journalingalife