During one of the most challenging times of my life I found a way to put my troubles aside for a time. Each night, during this most difficult time, I would lie my head on my pillow and be unable to sleep. One night I said to myself, “Jane, open up a file drawer in your mind and put this problem in there for the night, then you will be able to sleep.” Do you know that from that point on I was able to file my problems into their respective file drawers and there they stayed.
I still view my mind as a file cabinet. Each issue or task in my life gets filed when I am not using or working on it. This way, I am not obsessing over it constantly.
Take work, for instance. I am NEVER going to get to the bottom of the piles at work. There are tasks upon tasks, lists upon lists, files upon files. The work load is never-ending and it is very easy to take work home or at least worry about getting everything done. However, if we make a file cabinet in our minds, we can open the drawer and file it away until the next day! This way, work is work and home is home, and my mind is my mind. At home, there is a whole new set of problems and issues. Again, we do the best we can, and then we file them away until the next available time that we decide to open the drawer and deal with things.
If you're waiting to for life to slow down, it won't happen. This is just not going to happen. There will be slower weeks than others. There will be weeks when there are no meetings and you are all caught up with work both at work and home. However, there will also be weeks when there are too many appointments, money is low, the cat is projectile puking and someone breaks an arm. You will be pushed into feeling overwhelmed and stretched. This is when it is best to remember that we need to take one thing at a time, deal with it the best we can, and then file it away in that file cabinet of our minds.
Slow down you mind, dear friend. Breathe and take life's issues one file at a time. They are NOT YOU. They Are Things.
Take Good Care Today.
The filing you talk about I call compartmentalization. I don't think I could live my life sanely unless I separated the different areas of my life from one another. If I successfully compartmentalize, one part of my life can exist mutually exclusive of another part of my life. I would not be able to survive in this world if I carried "all of it" around together at one time.
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