The Art of Doing Everything

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There’s a good chance I’m going to die of a heart attack.

I don’t mean this as a threat, as just because of the happenings with my dad in the last couple of days. But because I have a history of being “The Great… Everything.” As the cliché goes, “jack of all trades, master of none.” I resent that. But still, just today I have redesigned a website, written a short story, checked up on my family, tried to be a good pet owner, a good housekeeper, a good writer, and a successful job hunter. And still, my feeling is that I haven’t done enough. Just yesterday, I spent an entire day working online, writing, and checking up on my family in the middle of a crisis, and even went to the gym, and yet, I’d say that I could have done more. No matter if I was up at 7 and went to bed at 1:30 in the morning, I absolutely, positively could have done more. And there’s a chance that I could do the same today. And tomorrow.

Why?

New York City is a culture based on being succesful. Elizabeth Gilbert, in her book, “Eat, Pray, Love,” speaks of each city’s “word”- a one word description of the major cities of the world. Rome=”sex”, the Vatican=”power”, and New York: “Achieve”. While Gilbert gives NYC its word, it’s almost impossible to say that she has it wrong. Since the 1970s, the city seems to have been built off of Frank Sinatra’s remnants, “If I can make it there/ I can make it anywhere.” Broadway is “the best” of the world’s theater (and even that’s not enough; now there’s the “Best of Broadway”), Wall Street is the place for “serious finance”, which is great, until, as we’ve seen recently, there’s a serious crash.

The tourists that come here ask us constantly, “How do you do it all? How do you see it all?”, and there’s one simple answer. You can’t. There’s ten million people in the Five Boroughs. That’s ten million waiters, brokers, writers, filmmakers, actors, mothers, fathers, every type of “ers”, all trying to live up to Sinatra’s mantra. All trying to succeed, the majority of them trying to do “it all”. But the majority of them are only here for a short time. I may be getting off track here a little, but many New Yorkers, myself included, in “striving to make it here”, burn out. They try to make the most of the city, but in doing so, they leave out some of the best parts. In trying to succeed, they lose track of what they came here for in the first place, and forget to relax. They leave New York, promising that “next time around”, they’ll “do it better.” As if they didn’t live up to the city’s standards. And even less, their own.

This is not supposed to be about New York, but it is about our culture. Depression affects nearly 19 million Americans, and any therapist will tell you, a very important step in treating depression is trying to get the patient to realize that right now, they are at this place, and at this time, and they have to deal with this situation. In other words, deal with one thing at a time. If the focal point of treating depression (while I’m fully aware that there are hundreds of other treatments) is to do one thing at a time, what makes dealing with our own lives any different?

Imagine you’re going to the grocery store. You walk in, and there are no aisles. There’s no organization. The breads are next to the cereals, the milk is next to the bread, the dog food is next to the lettuce. I don’t know about you, but I’d stop dead from being overwhelmed. But you put in aisles, and you can spend hours going up and down, looking at all the fantastic new products and food that can get you one step closer to your dreams, or at least, a full stomach. Those who went to a liberal arts school (myself included) also realize now that while it took you years to find the right career path, those who focused on a single field are already working, and probably doing fairly well for themselves. (Doh!)

I can’t think further ahead than one day at a time, and yet I find myself having panic attacks over and over again because of the vast thought that by the end of my lifetime, I have certain things I have to get done. While it’s great to have a plan, one shouldn’t find themselves curled up on the floor because they can’t get it all done today. It’s important to remember while we’re trying to “achieve” that achievement itself comes in small doses. You get the chance to compete before you get the medal. And before we find ourselves completely burnt out, we have to remember to take just a moment to think about what’s going on now, what we have to get done, and how it effects our overall desires. And once we’ve done this, we’ll find that our minds have a single accomplishable goal to focus on. In achieving this small win today, later we get to relax, because we know that we’ve done one small thing to take us to our goal tomorrow.

Time passes. Life goes on around us. And when you just sit and be, you don’t notice it. Things move, without any sense of a plan or meaning. But when you really look at it, even time, the most general fact in our universe, has a focus. Every decade, every year, every day, every hour, every minute, every second, there is a focus. But even time knows that in order to acheive, it must deal with one moment, well, at a time. After all, it can’t do everything.