“Bird by Bird”

I’m travelling in a few days. I feel restless, anxious and paralysed. Butterflies are roaming in my stomach as my productivity wanes. I just can’t be present, no matter what I do.

It’s a common theme for me to feel restless before travelling, but this time around the feeling is more intense. That feeling of restlessness has its roots in being overwhelmed after the anxiety-inducing events of the past few weeks.

I’m restructuring my company and as such I had to lay off many loyal members of the team. It wasn’t easy but it was a necessary move, and yet that was only the start of what I need to change within my company. There are still a thousand and one things I need to do and just as I had built up enough steam, the travel date for a trip I couldn’t cancel had arrived.

That sense of overwhelm has also been heightened as I’ve started writing my memoir. Work needs to be done. Deadlines need to be met. As if that weren’t enough, I’m also digging deep into my blog, writing niche and audience with guidance from a specialist coach so as to make my writing reach further and deeper.

As everything is at the starting point, I’ve been swamped with things to do and questions to answer. Everything has been coming at me with breakneck speed.

This reminds me of my words in an earlier post on anxiety:

We human beings have a primitive, built-in system that protects us from perceived threat or harm, be it physical (an impending saber-toothed tiger waiting to attack) or emotional (fear of not doing enough). It’s called the fight or flight response and is activated by an area of our brain known as the hypothalamus, which releases stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. These stress hormones affect us physiologically: our breathing increases, our heart rate goes up, and we feel a nervous tension. We become more aware of our surroundings, our pupils dilate, our senses get sharper, and we are in fight or flight mode. In survival mode, we default to our primordial, emotional mind and bypass our rational mind, which holds all our positive thoughts, newly formed beliefs, and good habits. Overwhelmed, we lose the ability to relax and become reactive.

I quickly recall Anne Lamott’s wonderful story in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

I need to slow things down. I don’t need to do everything in a day. Read an hour a day for thirty days and you can finish War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s book of 1,225 pages.

Step by step, bird by bird, anything can be achieved.