Serenity: No more to-do lists!
The waste paper has to go out. When sorting an old furniture store advertising falls out. "Must" is on a town sign. Including: Everywhere in Germany. I could add: And all the time. I feel caught. For example, today at breakfast: As the muses on jam bread and cereal bowl like a whirled hornet swarm buzzed.
Me: "We urgently need to wash the car." My friend: "Now we have to go to the market and then I have to go to the sport." Me: "Remember the laundry, it has to get into the machine and the tax return is still pending." This ended up on the to-do list: Clear cellar, call Anja, update the profile at Xing, finally buy a skinny jeans, so I'm already mercilessly behind anyway. In addition, we have to go out tonight, it's finally weekend ...
When was the last time we let life rain on us?as the writer Rahel Varnhagen once put it? Just let us drift and wait, what the day brings? Instead, we create never-ending to-do lists, as if everyday life were a wild animal that can only be tamed in this way. We constantly feel his claws in the neck, which drive us forward.
Anyway, my neck is so tense, I can not look right to the left and to the right, I have to count dates, make appointments with friends or the yoga lesson. Something is wrong here.
"That's the zeitgeist," says the teacher Barbara Berckhan. The world is turning faster and faster, and we have to keep an eye on everything in order to have a say, to think ahead, to be ready for action at the right moment. A thick calendar with appointments every half hour in addition, in addition to it large sticky notes on the edge - that is regarded as chic.
"Our attention is focused around the clock to achieve something," said Berckhan. "That's what counts in our society, although everyone is moaning, but somehow too proud to be so in demand and busy." After all, I can not tell anyone that I did not do anything for one day when my friends' six-year-old son had either football training, flute lessons or French after school.
The Zeitgeist stupidly caught me exactly in the rush hour of life. This is what sociologists call the gap between the end of 20 and the beginning of 40, when today's major life projects are jammed. Career, nest building, having children - Within a few years, we should be able to do everything that determines our future: professional, family, financial.
"Added to that is an increased level of internal and external demands," says Berckhan. That starts with little things. For the birthday party, for example, it is not enough to buy a frozen cake, it should be the self-baked organic rübli cake. Actually, baking could be fun - it would not be point 85 on the mental to-do list.
"If we feel we need something, we automatically develop an internal resistance," says Barbara Berckhan. "He is very subtle, but effective and takes you all pleasure." In addition, the constant pressure creates stress, which in turn means that we can no longer think clearly, no longer distinguish between important and unimportant. We develop a tunnel view, eventually see everything as a must.
By the way, there actually has to be. A village in Schleswig-Holstein, a few red brick houses and wide meadows where cows graze. Such a place that one desires, when one is overwhelmed by the awakening of everything that needs to be done. The real must look more like want.
And if you look closely, it's often the same in life. So I decided to cut the word out of my vocabulary. On my lists is now: I want to do this and that in the next two weeks - and when I feel like it. Of course, that also means that I learn to reduce my claims a bit and sometimes ignore it when a mountain waits laundry in front of the washing machine.
Not a very easy exercise, but in the end it is like this: there is always something lying anyway. Once you have completed a task, two new ones are guaranteed. By the way, the slogan for the sign "Müssen" is: "Nothing has to do, but everything can." That's my new mantra now.
