The beginning is half the task

There are challenges in life that become so large in our minds that we cannot figure out where to put our hands. Consider something as common as leaving a longtime home after the death of a spouse. The sentence itself sounds straightforward: I need to decide what to do with the house. But the house may contain thirty or forty years of a life. There are closets full of clothes, furniture chosen together, photographs, tools, dishes, paperwork, books, Christmas decorations and boxes nobody has opened in fifteen years. There may be repairs that have been postponed, questions about where to live next, financial decisions to make and belongings that suddenly carry considerably more emotional weight than their physical size would suggest.

Even the language we use matters here. I have become increasingly reluctant to call everything difficult a problem. The word carries a certain psychological weight. A problem suggests that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. I prefer challenge. A challenge may still be painful, complicated, unfair or exhausting, but it asks something different of me. It gives me something to engage with rather than something merely happening to me. That small reframe doesn’t change the circumstances. It changes the position from which I meet them.

“I need to deal with the house” is not actually one challenge. It is dozens, perhaps hundreds, of decisions masquerading as one enormous challenge. When we hold all of them in our minds simultaneously, the project becomes enormous before we have moved a single box. We imagine everything that eventually has to happen and somehow experience all of it as an obligation of the present moment. No wonder we become overwhelmed.

I have reinvented my life something like five times now, and you would think that would make me remarkably good at enormous transitions. It hasn’t. Give me a sufficiently complicated challenge and I can still stare at the whole damned thing until my brain decides there is no sensible place to begin. Experience has not made me immune to overwhelm. It has, however, taught me to recognize what I am doing sooner.

The first thing I have learned is to stop calling the whole thing one thing. “Deal with the house” needs to become smaller: decide what I want to keep, identify what can be sold, donate what someone else can use, remove what nobody wants, determine what repairs actually matter, understand the finances, choose where I am going and arrange the move. Once the challenge is dismantled, something interesting happens. Not everything is urgent. Some things cannot happen until other things happen first. Some decisions are surprisingly easy. And quite a few of those jobs do not require me at all.

That last part matters because overwhelm can make us strangely blind to resources. We start behaving as though meeting our challenge requires personally becoming competent at every task contained within it. Meanwhile, there are estate-sale companies whose entire business is dealing with houses full of belongings. Charities will pick up donations. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist can connect unwanted possessions with people who actually want them. Professional organizers can bring order to rooms that have become impossible to see clearly. Movers can pack as well as move. Property managers can help us prepare a home to rent, short-term or long-term. Realtors can tell us which repairs matter before selling and which ones probably aren’t worth the money. Mortgage brokers understand financing and often have access to programs we might be surprised to qualify for. Financial advisors can help us see the consequences of choices that may be difficult to evaluate while standing in the middle of a major transition.

Here in the Birmingham area, I can put names to some of those resources. For professional organizing and cleaning, I recommend Sherry Franklin at Southern-Bio. For estate sales, I recommend Peddling Post. Crocker Moving Services can help with the move and now offers junk removal, too. If you need portable storage while you work through the transition, I recommend Tim Blackmon at UNITS Moving and Portable Storage of Birmingham. For charitable giving, I recommend Grace Klein Community; contact them to find out which donations they can use.

For handyman work and repairs, I recommend Drew Spivey at CSC Services. For the decisions about the house itself, I recommend Cindy Edmunds with ARC Realty for buying or selling, and Rachel Trowbridge at First Federal Mortgage for mortgages. For financial advice, I recommend Aimee Barnes at Merrill Lynch. If you are considering keeping the house as a furnished rental, Furnished Finder is a resource for owners and property managers to connect with people looking for monthly accommodation.

Some pieces of a transition call for counseling or therapy. If that is the kind of help you need, I recommend Michael Hoye at Calvert + Associates. These recommendations give you somewhere to begin when you recognize a piece you would like help carrying.

The challenge may belong to us, but every job inside the challenge does not have to. I think this is where our ideas about self-reliance can work against us. Being capable does not mean doing everything ourselves. Sometimes the most capable thing we can do is identify precisely what requires our judgment and then find someone better equipped to handle the rest. I do not surrender authority over my life because I hire a mover. I preserve my energy for decisions that actually require me. There is a considerable difference between handing away responsibility and using available resources intelligently.

This applies to far more than houses. A divorce can become one enormous challenge. So can changing careers, recovering from a financial disaster, starting a business, closing one, moving across the country, caring for an aging parent or rebuilding life after someone we love dies. Even a change we desperately want can become paralyzing when we look at everything required to make it real. I have been through enough reinventions to know that the finished transformation always looks more coherent from a distance than it felt while I was living it.

What I remember from inside those transitions is much less impressive. I remember paperwork and phone calls. Research. Boxes. Mistakes. Asking people questions. Finding someone who knew something I didn’t. Making one decision only to discover that it created three more. There have been plenty of times when I knew my present circumstances could not remain as they were but could not yet see the bridge between the life I had and whatever was going to replace it.

So when I find myself overwhelmed now, I try to ask better questions. What exactly am I calling “the challenge”? What are the individual challenges hiding inside it? Which one actually needs attention first? Which decisions can wait? What requires my judgment? What can someone else do better, faster or with considerably less anguish? Who already knows how to solve this particular piece? And, perhaps most importantly, what is the next physical action I can take?

That last question has rescued me more than once because our minds can contemplate an entire future while our bodies remain stubbornly limited to the present. I cannot empty an entire house at 10:00 Tuesday morning. I can call an estate-sale company. I cannot build a new career this afternoon. I can contact one person. I cannot repair a difficult financial situation in one sitting. I can gather the statements and make an appointment with someone who understands them. The next action may be almost laughably small compared with the size of the challenge, but that is precisely why it works. Movement gives us information that standing still and thinking rarely does.

There is another advantage to breaking things apart: we regain our curiosity. An impossible challenge produces dread. A specific challenge gives us something to investigate. Who handles this? What would this cost? What are my options? What happens if I do nothing? What could make this easier? Those are questions with answers. Once we begin finding answers, the enormous shapeless thing starts acquiring edges. We can work with something that has edges.

Perhaps that is one of the most useful things I have learned from repeatedly rebuilding my own life. Reinvention rarely feels like reinvention while it is happening. It feels like Tuesday. It feels like cleaning a closet, making an uncomfortable phone call, asking for help, filling out a form, changing our minds, getting something wrong and trying again. Years later we can look backward and see the enormous distance traveled. While we are traveling it, however, we only ever occupy the few inches beneath our feet.

If you are standing in front of something enormous right now, you do not need to solve your whole life before dinner. Start by changing the language if that helps: this is a challenge, not a problem. Then pull it apart until you can see what it is actually made of. Separate what requires your judgment from what merely requires doing. Look deliberately for people and resources that can carry pieces of the load, and choose one action small enough to complete today.

The whole challenge may still be enormous, but the next thing isn’t.

Sometimes, though, the hardest part is seeing the pieces when we are standing inside them. Our own circumstances are crowded with history, emotion, assumptions and consequences that someone outside them can often see around. A good conversation can expose an option we had not considered, turn one enormous challenge into six manageable ones, or simply help us determine which thing deserves our attention first. I know how valuable that can be because I have needed those conversations myself.

That is increasingly the work I want to do with people. Not tell them what their lives should look like, and certainly not pretend I possess answers they don’t. I am interested in sitting beside someone with the complicated thing spread out between us and asking good enough questions that possibilities begin to appear. I have spent much of my own life reinventing, building, dismantling, reconsidering and beginning again. Somewhere along the way, I became very good at seeing possibilities where circumstances initially seem to offer very few.

If you are facing a challenge that has become too large to see clearly, you are welcome to bring it to me. We can take it apart together, look for resources and possibilities you may not be able to see from where you are standing, and find a place to begin.

Schedule an Advisory Consultation

Be. Curious.

P.S. If you liked this article, find more of Nichole’s essays on Substack at A Lady Stoic.