Natural Cycles

It's been a difficult month. There's been a lot going on and a lot of changes. Kid starting school, visitors, returning guests, changing weather, illness, and so on. The result is that our energy levels are quite low. In recent years I've realized that the key to dealing with these times is to acknowledge them and not berate myself for all the things I'm not doing. Instead, I need to conserve my energy and put it toward those things that are most important.

This is good advice for any kind of crisis, including financial. And "financial crises" does seem to be on everyone's minds lately, doesn't it? In my two part article, Filling The Well, I talked about building up a reserve during the good times in order to have a cushion for the bad. Financial certainly, but also mental, emotional, and physical. Part two of this article has lots of practical advice and steps for starting those reserves from scratch when you're completely tapped out. However, what I didn't go into as deeply were techniques for ongoing maintenance.

Now is the time -- when I first realize that we've been too busy, stressed, rundown, and ill -- to start working on those reserves. It's easy to wait too long and run completely out of gas before thinking about mitigation. But that's a mistake. To use a financial metaphor, the earlier you realize that your checking balance is low, the more options you have to fix it. If you wait until after you start bouncing checks, things will be much more difficult. This is where the prosperity key of introspection comes in handy. Keeping an eye on yourself let's you identify problems early (just like keeping an eye on your account).

So once you realize that you're heading toward a low ebb, how do you fix it? One thing that works for me is to triage -- which is basically extreme prioritization. What's most important? What can wait and get deferred until later? What can get canceled altogether? For me that means focusing only on:
* Our family's health
* The day job and school
* The budget

And that's it. Everything else gets postponed in order to give us time to recuperate. Physically we put the focus on eating well and getting enough rest. Mentally, we take a break from worrying about the small stuff. Emotionally, we spend time together strengthening our connections. At the same time, we work on making sure that priority issues are handled. That means deadlines and homework, bills and budget will still get done if at all possible.

It's hard to put other things on hold. To make excuses for existing commitments and avoid taking on new ones. But it's worth it. Because by focusing on building reserves the rough patch goes faster, which means I can get back to working on all those other things sooner. This is better than dragging along, overallocated and exhausted until I collapse and nothing gets done. And taking off a couple of afternoons early to grab a nap is better than getting completely ill and missing a week of work -- better for me as well as the job.

It's also critical that I not kick myself for what I'm not doing. I had this experience yesterday walking home from the bus. I was thinking about all the things I wanted to accomplish this autumn that I hadn't yet -- and here we are in October already. But then I realized that September was the craziest month we'd had in a long time. It's OK that we didn't get more done. In fact, it's smart.