We hear about the importance of taking that first step all the time, but what about all the steps we must take after that? Aren’t they just as important, if not even more so?
This is just me thinking out loud (or through text, I guess… haha) as I reflect on my own experience with therapy. Taking that first step was incredibly important, because it brought me to therapy. But I have to continue showing up each week. Sometimes even showing up doesn’t feel like enough, those times when it feels like I’ve made no progress since my last session.
Note to self: Show up for yourself each and every day, not just on the days you have therapy.
As I sit here writing this, I notice the notification in the corner of my screen telling me it’s time to update my computer. For the past few days, I’ve been clicking “remind me tomorrow”. I do this with a lot of things, like with my clothes that are sitting in the living room at the moment. They are all folded and ready to go, but for some reason I find it really hard to actually put them away when it really would only take me five minutes or so. Same goes with this update on my computer. It realistically would take me less than five seconds to do… all I have to do is click a button!!
I have just had bad experiences with updating my phone in the past that make me hesitant to click update half the time. But those updates are important. They keep your phone up to date, like the name implies...
The reason I've had issues updating my phone in the past is actually because I would wait too long to actually do it. I also would never take the time to go through and delete anything, so my storage would always be pretty full. A lesson that I am trying to take away from these experiences is that... (as with many things in life) if we continue to wait until tomorrow, tomorrow just might be too late.
When I finally would take the time to update my phone, I’d have to do it through my computer because there wouldn’t be enough storage on the phone for the phone to do it on its own. The storage would be so full, that I wouldn’t be able to delete anything. Things would just come back after I'd try to delete them. And then, during the update my phone would get stuck in recovery mode.
It’s important to keep up with things because when we don’t something that should only take us five minutes turns into this big ordeal. We must sustain our devices, just as we sustain ourselves. We eat. We shower. We do our laundry. We clean our homes. We can’t expect our devices to keep themselves up to date. They need to be taken care of as well. They help us out by letting us know that they require an update or are running out of space, but we are the ones that have to take action.
If you’re someone that knows me, you know that I have always had a problem with there never being any space left on my phone. Just after 4 months with my new phone, I already have 40 GB of my storage being taken up by photos and videos. You would think that I have learned my lesson by now (with the experiences I have had with my phone being stuck in recovery mode due to my lack of maintenance), but I still somehow manage to take WAY too many pictures and never go through and delete anything.
Right when I am done writing this, I am going to get up and do the couple of things I have been putting off. I am finally going to put those clothes away. Then I am going to put my sheets in the wash. I am quickly going to update whatever apps my computer is telling me are ready to go. I’m going to publish this blog post; and then I am going to go make my family vegan cheesesteaks for dinner !! because I have been putting that off for a few days now.
One thing that is going to take me a little more time and effort is going through all of my pictures and videos to see if there is anything that I am able to part ways with. Then, I have to figure out where to store anything that is taking up unnecessary space on my phone. This feels daunting. I just have SO many pictures from years past that it's hard to know where to start... or what to even do with all of these pictures. It would be much easier if I had gone through them over the years instead of trying to sort through several years of photos all at once, but here we are.
I think I am going to do a whole blog post about that process, if anyone would even be interested in reading about that. That was actually the idea I had for this week, but it morphed into this instead. I need to figure out how I can relate that to minimalism, so I’ll be thinking about that one.
For now, promise me you’ll get up from wherever you are sitting at the moment when you’re done reading this and do something you’ve been putting off. Tomorrow you’ll be grateful that you did it today!
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