Things in my life are pretty upside down right now. Trying to finish building a house, manage a move, dealing with a LOT of upheaval and change at work. Lots going on. Some of it is very good (new house). Some is neither good or bad, it just is (moving). Some is bad (restructuring/downsizing at work is difficult). I know that for me, change is very stressful, even if the change is something I really want and will be a positive thing when it is done. No matter how careful my planning is, it all seems to happen with the most inconvenient timing. You know how you end up with a big project at work right before you are to go on vacation. Yea that kind of timing.

I’m really evaluating how I’m choosing to face this time. In the past, my approach has best been described as “live a stately life as Cleopatra (Queen of the Nile {denial}) until the point when I am so overloaded that I fall apart into a million blithering pieces, then drag myself along to the finish line. Well, as they say in my improv group, that’s an interesting choice. Not the most effective way to go, but that’s apparently my default.

This time I’m trying to make it different. I’m trying to realize that I cannot control all of the variables in any of these situations. Heck I really can only control a couple of things about the move, and honestly I cannot control anything at work even one tiny little bit. So my lesson this summer is to control what is within my actual span of control and just release the rest.

I’m a list maker. Yes there are a ton of lists for the house. Of course there are. This year there is also a list titled “Things I Cannot Control”. I have listed on there, all the things that need to happen but that I cannot do anything about. My reasoning for this is that this tells me I have evaluated that particular item and have decided it is outside of my span of control, therefore spending any more time on it is not going to change the outcome, so it goes on this list. When I start winding myself up about things, I look at that list and if my train of though centers around items on that list, I stop myself and remind myself out loud that this is not on my workable list. The out loud part is important, I might talk about that next week a bit.

So here I sit, with a bunch of lists, but one of them is to remind me what is not my job, what I do not have control over. I need to focus on the list of my tasks. I need to be doing the stuff that I can do, not spending my time grinding on things I cannot affect. I’m finding some interesting side effects. I’m less upset in the grand scheme of things. I’m more effective (ie getting done faster) with the things that are on my to do list.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still freaking out about all of this. I have still kept Labor Day weekend completely blocked out to have a nervous breakdown, but in the mean time, I am cranking along and getting my stuff done and releasing the rest of it to the universe. Let the universe have a couple of sleepless nights, not me.