the graceful execution of productivity

If I'd tried to plan a schedule ahead of time for everything I did today, I would have been stressed. If I'd written a list, I probably wouldn't have slept well last night, anticipating the tension of fitting everything in, meeting deadlines, meeting expectations. On paper, it would have looked impossible, the kind of day only a hyper overachiever could complete. But I did it, gracefully.

I've been making a serious effort these days to walk in grace rather than walk under the weight of expectations. Though I felt the pull of anxiety slightly on a few occasions today (moments when I thought I should be in hyper-productivity mode, like the bad old days) for the most part I think I got the hang of walking in grace. The very cool thing was that I still managed to meet some important expectations (my own and those of others), and while I still have an enormous to-do list, I chipped away at it in a fairly reasonable fashion, rolling from one task to another like someone who knows what they're doing. I'd like to remember today as a day when I managed to get in a pretty good practice run at being sensibly, gracefully productive.

At that, a deep-rooted Fear pipes up with, "Yeah, but you'll never finish your to-do list without putting in a few 18-hour work days, starting yesterday!" It's hard to be okay with the looming lists and the risk of disappointing expectations. My apartment is still in a total tip and I have clients waiting for orders and proofs. I worry that the walking-in-grace thing is going to backfire and my fears will be realized. But the lesson of last week was that my perception of what others expect of me is generally pretty off. So, I'll keep practicing walking in grace and hope that the fear that speaks against this grace will lose its strength. God give me the courage to walk in grace.