A couple of years ago I took my young niece to the cinema to see Frozen 2. Imagine the Elsa dress, paired with sparkly doc Martin boots, copious snacks to keep us going, and a 3 year old that didn’t find her quiet voice very often!
Anyway, one of the reasons I like my niece to watch the Frozen films is that, unlike some of the other Disney films, there’s no white knight trotting in to save the helpless girl. Instead, two sisters save each other, and as niece number one had been joined by niece number two, positive sisterhood messages were the priority. Seriously though, my sister and I are close and we want the same thing for our kids with their siblings.
At one point in the film, it was all going wrong. The usual drama before the happy ending, but one of the sisters was upset and overwhelmed, so she sat and had a good sob (as you do!) and then decided to get up and crack on and, in the words of the song she sang, just do the next right thing.
The overwhelm, the sob, the idea that you need to prioritise the next right thing really resonated with me and at the time I thought it would make a great blog post. The problem is that the next right thing for me was not a blog post, in fact that was about 100 places down the list behind everything else that I had decided were the priority.
I was spinning a lot of plates and I was happy doing that, I prefer to be busy rather than bored and it’s important to me to build relationships and make memories which is why I wanted to take my niece to the cinema that day. Not so we could watch the film really, but so she could experience the cinema and the big screen and shared viewing. And of course the snacks! I’m definitely not an all work and no play kind of person. I don’t want to look back at my life and feel like I’ve missed out because I didn’t have the right balance.
But there were a lot of plates spinning and I realised something had to give. When we’re overwhelmed, doing the next right thing is important because it keeps you moving forward in the right direction. Some of those things are really hard, and over the past couple of years I’ve really felt the weight of responsibility of being a parent as well as a daughter, an aunty, a relative, a friend, a colleague and a business owner.
When life happens and gets in the way you can keep pushing on and run yourself into the ground. Or not. You can choose to take things off your plate and put them on the back burner. Sometimes the things you drop are the things you’d rather do but you pick the harder thing and get on with it because you know it’s the right thing to do. We can all wish for different circumstances when these hard things come along, but sometimes we know we’re going to do them anyway, no matter how difficult.
I do think that sometimes the timing isn’t right and you can push and push towards something and make no progress. Then at another times when everything is right, it feels easy and all falls into place. So when you next feel overwhelmed, just do the next right thing. Don’t do everything. And keep focusing on what the next right thing is and prioritising that, and put everything else on the back burner for another day. You will get through it, and when you do, all that stuff you took off your plate will be there for you to pick up again, when the time is right.