A Race to the Start

Sometimes mundane things can trigger big thoughts, like this morning when I opened the fridge. I saw the juice bottle in the door and noticed there was very little juice left in it. Not enough to fill the smallest glass in the house. Not even enough to fully cover the bottom of the bottle!

My first thought was why? Why did someone put it back in the fridge instead of finishing it? Ideally one would have finished it, rinsed out the bottle, tossed it in the recycle and put a replacement bottle in the fridge. This wouldn’t have taken long. But no. The almost empty juice bottle remained in the fridge.

I instantly saw this as a symbol of the many tasks around our house we have begun but left unfinished. So many of them are minutes away from completion. How much better would my life be if I could clear out these mini tasks and no longer have them hanging over me each day? How much more efficient could I be if I didn’t feel like a deer in the headlights whenever I look around our house and catalog what remains to be done?

So what if for the first 15 minutes after the kids leave for the bus I take on those tasks. For starters I can sort through the bag of things we cleared out of the car before it was towed in for repair. I can take the ski socks we lent to a friend back to the basement and return them to the ski bag. I can post the magazines we have to give away on Freecycle. None of these should take longer than 15 minutes. After a week I will have put in over an hour, after a month over five. And task by task I will clear the decks, finishing these things and making room in our lives for beginnings.