Hello! As usual, my day is packed and I got to bed late: again. While it is easy to romanticize the simple life; picturing life off the grid without a care in the world, the reality is that homesteading is hard work. There is a great saying concerning homesteading, “the easy way is hard enough when you are homesteading!” Homesteading, living self-sufficiently means going back to doing many things the way they were done in a simpler time.
Hanging clothes is a great example, it is easy to do, it is very relaxing to be out in the sunshine but it still takes more time to hang and then bring in the clothes than it does to toss them into the dyer. While you save more money and the clothes smell like sunshine, it is still one more job to do. Many hands can make light work, but now that our boys are gone, all the work falls on the two of us and some days I am overwhelmed with the workload.
When I find myself stressing out I try to remember two things. It’s time to take a break and it’s time to look back on all that I have gotten done today, not what is still out front to accomplish.
A good friend told me to step back and reflect on what is done, not what was unfinished one day as I was in a tizzy preparing for a tea party. She encouraged me to assess what I had finished or had in the works and to focus on the fact that so much was done rather than all that still needed to be finished. I took her advice and it worked!! I felt much better about pressing on knowing that many items were already off my to-do list!
At the end of the day, there will always be one more thing that needs to be done but it’s often more expedient to stop and watch the sunset. Get to bed early tonight, if you can.
