Feeling stuck—where even the simplest task feels too heavy to lift? In this episode, instead of chasing rigid productivity, listeners will discover the subtle art of finding ease within challenge, tuning into the rhythms of play, and learning how to gently move forward even when motivation wanes.

Listeners will learn:

How play, frustration, and challenge intertwine, illuminating gentler ways forward
Practical methods to surface and honor emotions that hinder focus, catalyzing growth through compassion

Takeaways:

Pause to reflect deeply before acting, creating space for authentic decisions
Shrink tasks down to their smallest steps, inviting ease rather than pressure
Channel rhythms of natural play into even the most stubborn work moments

This episode features a performance of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. Subscribe and join our growing community at rhythmsoffocus.com—where wandering minds thrive along waves of agency and creativity.

Keywords

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #Agency #Mindfulness #GentleProductivity #PlayfulFocus #EmotionalEase #CreativeFlow #CompassionateGrowth #MicroActions

Transcript

All right. Let's see what I've got on my list here to do today. All right. Uh, visit the gym. Are you kidding me?

Sometimes the simplest things can feel like the heaviest weights. The simpler they are, the more paradoxically we "can't be bothered."

Head to the garage, show up to the dishes, open the report- all of these can come with a wave of revulsion.

How could we ever move forward?

I often and continue to espouse a "visit" as a powerful unit of work. This idea of showing up to something or bringing it to ourselves and staying there for one single deep breath, and then making a decision as to what we wanna do, whether walk away or into the work.

It is a powerful unit of work, but even so, it might still be too difficult to make it there, even with this idea of not having to do a thing.

What then? I imagine there have been times that you've been here. Maybe someone kept bugging you, maybe a due date crept along far enough, or just yelled at yourself into this sort of painful, "just start" and you finally started going.

But there are gentler paths and you may well have done those too.

Take for example, how we already act when we are in play. When we enjoy something naturally, we might bump into frustrations, take stock of where we are, slow down, break things down, simplify things, find some ease once again, and finally return with that ease back into challenge. Dynamically, we tune to the windows of challenge for where we are in that moment.

We find those places that are not so easy to be boring and not so intense as to be overwhelming.

We can adapt the same process to difficult work, hard work, something we can also call emotional work, only by bringing the process to consciousness. The first and perhaps most important step is to pause, where we reflect without reacting, where we can connect to that deeper sense of self. It gives us that space to decide:

" Maybe this isn't even a thing that is meaningful for me at all."

But if we do decide to move forward. We can also sense in that pause where we rest in those emotions that we discover something hidden in the words that we've been using. The sort of, "I just don't wanna" sort of phrase, we might be saying to ourselves, we can discover this deep, complex, emotional world beneath those words.

In that pause, we might see one such emotion that's contributing that of let's say, exhaustion. This consequence of repeated hits to our sense of agency, dropping, losing, forgetting things. We lose the sense of capability. Any attempt risks yet another injury as a fear of true inability would rear its ugly head in these clouds, choking us into collapse.

Fully engaging these emotions, maybe even feeling them physically within our body, we can now better find this genuine tendril of ease, somewhere within there, somewhere within ourselves, or at least something easier. Whether we slow down, we break something down to some tiniest of tiny next steps, or find this fundamental basic within the complex moment, there may be something we can work into an ease.

A being able to do with barely a thought, even if it's to hardly lift a leg off the couch. Finally, if we're able to find that path to that tiny ease, we can then ask,

"Can I gently bring that ease with me forward and to some next step?"

Sometimes we may even be able to continue onward to make a visit, stepping up to the work to stare at the vista now with our full emotional selves, and we can then fully decide whether or not to engage that wave of focus as smooth or as rough as it may end up being.

So much of our culture, extols the virtue of the hard. Challenge- it can be wonderful, but how do we deal with it? It's not about pushing harder. No pain, no gain. This sentiment is there might be some truth to it somewhere within it, but it also skips the part of how the pain is more messenger than fuel.

Why lose sight of the gentle origins of play nourished in an earth of gentle ease? We can certainly pay attention to pain, but we can also spend time and care where play may build into a more matured, elegance and supple power.

So the takeaway here is the next time you find yourself in play in something you're enjoying, that feels meaningful to you, that has you in some depth, see if you can find those moments of frustration. Those moments where it's like,

"Oh, how does this work?"

And see how it fits in with challenge, how you might slow down, simplify, shrink things down, and then find that ease and come back and how that might be happening naturally without even conscious awareness.

And if you can do that, think of how you might start bringing that to things that might be more difficult, things you might wanna avoid and see if that might actually be able to be transferred there too.

Scott Joplin, king of Ragtime, created this wonderful piece of music called the Maple Leaf Rag. Copyrighted in 1899 the piece is this jumble of back and forth ideas. One thing happens here, but it doesn't happen there. Over and over throughout the piece as I play it, I need to be in this sort of meditative question of

Where am I?

Because as soon as I lose sight of that question, I'm in the wrong place and have made plenty of mistakes.

By many accounts performing this piece should be "hard." But the practice, as is with mastery in general, is about bringing what's hard, to easy and the gentle path there. We can break things down into the tiniest of single notes, single chords.

Maybe I'm asking myself, oh, what's this about? And then I allow myself to wonder in my own time to form with the sounds.

It's an absolutely lovely piece and I do hope you enjoy it.

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