Large, seemingly insurmountable tasks are often far less intimidating once we begin.
Running your own business has a funny way of forcing you to confront your own weaknesses.
For me, this week, that weakness was avoidance.
I've been months behind on tracking expenses, something I've been reminded of each morning by the growing stack of receipts piling up on my desk.
It had been sitting on my to-do list for weeks, but each time I thought about starting, I found some other "productive" task to distract myself.
The good news is that my room, kitchen, and car have never been cleaner. :)
The bad news, of course, is that neglect has a way of turning into anxiety.
I pride myself on running this farm in a lean and profitable manner. I want this space to serve as proof that farming at a small scale can work, so long as you're committed, consistent, and creative in how you grow and distribute fresh food.
So perhaps catching up on expense reporting had less to do with the boredom and repetitiveness I expected to find, and more to do with the hard realities I feared might reveal themselves once I finally ran the numbers.
Would I discover that I had been operating at a loss?
Would I learn that I had been mistaken about whether this whole farming thing was financially viable?
Would this vision I have for a more local food system reveal irreparable cracks?
When I finally sat down and did the work, I was relieved to see that we have, in fact, been turning a profit.
But what stood out to me even more was the reminder that large, seemingly insurmountable tasks are often far less intimidating once we begin.
You just have to start. And starting taught me something about momentum I keep having to relearn.
The Momentum of Small Actions
One of the more comforting—and confronting—ideas I've come to appreciate as an adult is that actions compound.
A single productive choice rarely changes your life overnight. But those choices have a tendency to build upon one another.
The same is true in the opposite direction.
This may be why, when things are going well, they often seem to be going really well. And when we're struggling, it can feel as though everything is unraveling at once.
The encouraging part is that momentum works both ways.
No matter how long you've avoided something, no matter how far behind you feel, you can interrupt the pattern at any moment by taking one small step in a different direction.
I felt this almost immediately.
The first receipt was difficult.
By the fiftieth, I was finding my rhythm.
By the two-hundredth, you couldn't have paid me to stop.
All of this is to say: if you're facing something challenging right now, don't beat yourself up.
You're not alone in feeling overwhelmed or outmatched.
Just know that it's in you to begin.
And once you do, you might be surprised by how hard it becomes to stop.
✌️