“I knew it in my gut,” we say.  “I just had a bad feeling.”  Gavin de Becker writes in Protecting The Gift that this little frisson of fear is one of the most powerful intuitive gifts we have.  We override our animal instinct at our peril, and we should nurture it in our children.  But sometimes fear keeps us trapped in safe but narrow lives, far from our dreams.  How can you tell which kind of fear you’re feeling?  Martha Beck explains the difference with this metaphor: Imagine standing on a high dive.  It’s very, very high.  Now look down.  Are you about to dive into cold, clear water--or into toxic waste?  One will feel terrifying but clean.  The other will feel sickening, nauseating.  That icky feeling is a clear warning--a No--from every instinctual part of you.  Honor that wisdom.  And if the situation twinkling far below feels scary but thrilling, take the plunge!

This was first published in Being A Broad magazine, where I write a monthly column called Advice For Renegades.  Reproduced with permission.

    I have been thinking a lot about getting organized.  I even gave a telecourse on it.  Hellllo, humility!  There’s nothing like teaching something to throw a harsh light on how imperfectly I’m implementing it myself.   Life is moving fast these days, and there’s more clanging and flashing lights and ding-ding-dings than before.  
    I love riding the wave of this joyful hubbub.  
    And some days I can barely keep up.  
    Before class I looked guiltily into the inbox that had way more than three things in it; I cast a glance at the stack of receipts that needed to be processed; I tried to ignore the buzzing urgency of emails waiting to be answered.  I was secretly glad that no one could see the actual office I was conducting the telecourse from.  
    But stop.  Wait.  I’m not a total fraud.  This mild overlay of clutter was just a few days’ worth of buildup, easily handled.  These days, when I have stacks of paper waiting to be processed, it’s because I’ve decided that they’re not urgent—not because I’ve just forgotten about them.  I hardly ever feel the panic I used to feel all the time, when I never knew when some overlooked item might blow up in my face, requiring sudden onslaughts of unscheduled work and deadline rearranging.  In short, the way my life operates now is a whole different ballgame than it used to be.  
    Which is why I gave the class in first place.  Not because I’m perfectly organized, but because I am so inherently non-organized.  In my desperation to keep my life from degenerating into total chaos after I had a baby, I’d gotten really motivated.  Since none of this keeping-track-of-stuff comes naturally to me, I had to learn it—and I knew that along the way I’d learned things that could help others like me, those of us whose minds are wonderful at parsing problems and dreaming up new ideas, but are terrible at remembering things, things like numbers and appointments and, uh, what was I saying again?  Look at the pretty sparkles on my window!
    But there I was again the day of the telecourse, facing up to the fact that my life once again required a concentrated input of time and energy from me if it was going to run smoothly.  I don’t like that part, so I tend to ignore it until it reaches critical mass.  Critical mass today requires thirty minutes of brisk, painless sorting; critical mass in the old days meant days and days of shoveling and lots of weeping.  So things are infinitely better.  But staying on top of the momentum and details of my life is never going to be effortless for me.  Instead of getting discouraged that I don’t run things like Margaret in The West Wing, I’m going to choose to marvel at how much better I’m doing than ever before.  This path I’m on isn’t a rut.  Nope, this here is a spiral.  We keep coming back to the same issues, but each time we’re looking at them at a slightly more sophisticated level.  
    I find this most heartening.  
    Except that this is also just another way of saying that we’re never finished, either.  
    Damn flip side.  
    I keep trying to get “caught up,” when the truth is, there is no up.  I keep getting more organized because I have more to organize.  I keep getting faster because I have more interesting and demanding things to do.  As my favorite productivity guru David Allen warns, when you get really efficient, what happens?  You get given more to do.  
    Martha Beck talks about how she overcame her fear of public speaking.  She was so terrified that she actually passed out cold the first time she got behind a podium.  She pushed through the fear, and what do you think that meant?  That she never had to be afraid again?  No indeedy.  Now she speaks to ever-larger audiences and does live TV, and if you don’t find live TV terrifying, you’re not paying enough attention.  As her ability got bigger, so did the opportunities—and the challenges.  
    We spend so much time pining for whatever big break we’re yearning for, certain that it will give us what we want.  We want the book contract, we want to be our own boss, we want to have a baby, we want the big gig.  The heavens align, miracles happen, our ship comes in, and boom!  We get what we wanted.  Most of us do a victory dance for a few hours or a few days, but then—almost inevitably—panic sets in.  Suddenly the bar has been raised.  Did you score a weekly column?  Now you have to actually crank it out week after week in front of everyone you know.  Did you finally get your house organized?  Now people will want to start hosting events there.  Did you finally start your own business?  Now you have to—try not to pee yourself—run an actual small business.
    What I’m figuring out in all this is that I’m never going to get caught up.  I’m never going to have the moment where I think, “There!  I’ve crossed everything off.  Now I can just take the next year off and relax.”  I just don’t work like that.  As soon as I get one thing mastered, I’m using it as a stepping stone to the next thing.  I do this because it is FUN.  But also I do it because humans grow, that’s what we do, it’s the definition of being alive.  
    I’d better not wait to sit back and relax when it’s all over because it’ll never be all over.  So I’m going to give myself permission to just go ahead and rest.  Go ahead and celebrate.  Go ahead and play.  I don’t mean this theoretically.  I will stop in the middle of the day and take a nap or a walk.  I’ll celebrate the small victories, like clearing my email inbox, with an impromptu dance party.  I’ll finish the laundry and then stop and read a magazine, even though there is a never-ending chain of chores still clamoring for my attention.  Sometimes I get confused and start to think that I need to cross everything off my list so that I can get to my real life.  No.  It’s all my real life.  Every single glorious, sticky, messy, shining moment.