Imagining a perfect ADHD day

Next Wednesday Dr. J and I are hosting the fourth and final of our Spring Series workshops. It’s the final in the series, and it’s about building the life you want. Not the ideal world. Your life. Creating what your ideal day would look like, ADHD aside. And then making it happen.
With all the deadlines we have, and the overwhelm and one immediate crisis after another in our face, it’s easy to never step back and ask, “What am I up to, what do I want to do?” Hard to ponder your long term goals when you’re racing through traffic cause you’re late for the dentist. When your bank account is overdrawn for the fourth month in a row, the answer to, “What’s your dream life look like?” might produce an answer like, “Less overdue notices.”

Imagining how your “perfect day” would unfold is a challenge when you’re walking out of the tax department offices after your audit, and you can’t remember where you parked your car, or even if you drove the car, or if you still own that car!

Yet it’s incredibly valuable to step back and figure out where you are headed and if where you are going still appeals to you. Some people do it quite regularly. Others wait to have it thrust upon them by a midlife crisis.

Maybe things have shifted. When I was twenty I wanted to meet girls. Now I want to nap a lot.

The exercises we’ll be doing on the evening of the 21st are simple, and the questions they ask can sound almost too simple, but every time I’ve done them they have actually made me feel much lighter, clearer and less… well, less ADHD.
Life goes better when you have some idea where you are going.

And it especially helps when everyone in your life is aware of what’s up.
If you’ve got 40 people together, and a lot of wood, and nails and saws, and everyone starts cutting and nailing and building… well, it would help to know whether you were building an a cottage or a church. Things just go a lot better and it actually makes decisions much easier. “Should we include a place for the priest to light the candles?” “No, it’s a cottage. We’ll put in a fireplace.”
Or…
“We don’t need a boathouse. This is a Catholic Cathedral.”
The clearer your are where you are going, the sooner you get there.

In fact, when you’re trying to tidy, trying to plan the day, or the week, or the month, it helps to step back and look at the big picture. It doesn’t have to be deeply significant. But it helps to let go of things when you decide, I’m not interested in that anymore. Physical clutter and mental clutter. It’s amazing, when you know where you’re going, how little you need to get there. And if you’re carrying less weight, the trip goes much faster.