The Habit I Can’t Quite Shake: Doing All the Things

Finding sacred stillness in the mundane.

I have a habit I need to kick.
The habit is trying to do all the things.

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I want a garden and to tend to all my chickens.
Keep up with cleaning the coop more regularly.
Add dairy goats so I can milk them every day and make goat milk soap.
Use that same milk to make other things, and can all the things from my garden.
Make all the jams I dream up.
Add more products to my farm stand.
Bake all the sourdough (a multiple-day process, but so worth it).

And I want to paint.
To get my she-shed together so I can lose myself there—
paint all the things, reopen my Etsy shop,
sell my paintings, take commissions,
and feel that sacred stillness that comes when I create.

I want to learn how to sew.
To do more needle felting.
To crochet gifts for others and make things for the farm stand.
To junk journal—collecting bits of ephemera that tell their own quiet stories.
To write in my Substack more regularly.
To send out writing pieces for publication.
To share my heart with the world.
To be inspired again—with prompts, ideas, and meaning.

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I want to do another presentation for a motherhood conference.
To start a podcast with my friend Haley—the one we’ve dreamed about.

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And I want to homeschool better.
Not just the bookwork, but the together loop—the fun, the field trips, the creative days.
I want to go to more co-op activities,
plan more myself, take the kids to the library more, and play outside with them more.
(Though this week’s rain has made that a challenge.)

I want to be a better wife—to love Nick more intentionally,
to meet his needs, to serve him,
to show him how much I see and appreciate all he does.

I want to be a better mom.

I want our home to be a refuge from the world.

‘Home” by Amber Eldredge | Etsy shop

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I want to find my rhythm again—
a true, steady rhythm of household maintenance and the mundane,
which are really the sacred things:
laundry, dishes, meal planning, grocery runs.

I want to stop using language that shames myself.
Like I just did.
“I want to be a better…”—implying I’m not enough.

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For a while, my health didn’t allow me to do the mundane but essential things to run a household.
Now that my health does allow me,
it’s my the anxiety and PTSD that get in the way.
The noise.
The chaos.
The loudness that comes with love and life and kids—it all triggers me.

And so the cycle begins.

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For a while, I’ll stay consistent with my Substack, but then another ball drops.
I’ll do well with the farm stand, but something else slips.

I can’t do all the things.
But I want to.

And in the quiet moments, I remind myself—
the first ball I want to hold steady is my relationship with God and Jesus Christ.

To have daily, meaningful prayer.
To open my scriptures and linger there,
reading slowly enough to understand and feel.
Not rushing through to check it off a list,
but pausing—truly connecting—and carrying those moments of prayer in my heart throughout the day.

The next ball is my relationship with my husband,
then my relationship with my children,
and only then comes everything else.

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And maybe, just maybe,
it’s time to stop always thinking about what future me wants—
the future garden, the perfect rhythm, the finished she-shed,
the ideal version of our land and my art and all my dreams—
and instead focus on present me.

What can today’s me do—right now—
to tend to what truly matters most?
To bring those top three things into balance,
or at least to add to them, even in small, imperfect ways?

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Because peace isn’t found in doing all the things.
It’s found in doing the right things,
right here, right now.

Peace is found in the seemingly mundane tasks—
in the quiet folding of laundry, the stirring of a pot, the sweeping of a floor.
It’s found in the pause before I react to my children,
in the breath I take to refocus and re-center
on what I truly want to be doing in this very moment.

Not to should on myself,
but to re-center on what I truly desire at my core—
to fill the buckets that matter most,
to raise up the balls I want higher,
instead of juggling the unnecessary ones.

And maybe that’s the real rhythm I’ve been searching for all along.

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🕊 Closing Reflection

If you’re reading this and nodding along, I hope you know you’re not alone.
So many of us carry the weight of wanting to do it all—because our hearts are full of good things.
But maybe the real work is learning which things to set down,
and trusting that God will help us carry the rest.

Here’s to finding peace in the pause,
and learning to love the life we already have—
one quiet, imperfect, sacred moment at a time.