Getting to Flow

I had one "most important thing" to do today.  That was to get my father's 2013 income taxes filed.  I'd bailed out last April and filed for a 6 month extension.  I had them prepared and copied, but hadn't found the time to double check them and package them up for mailing.

I thought it would be the first thing I did after breakfast, and then it would be clear sailing for the rest of the day.  But it wasn't the first thing I did, or the second.  I wasn't intentionally procrastinating, but as I finished one thing another would appear, and it seemed right to do it rather than try to stick it on a mental to-do list, which I've found becomes another source of stress.

I felt that I was in a flow, where I was participating in the actions but not "doing" them.  That is, it didn't seem that I was exerting any effort, either mentally or physically.  I didn't lose track of my most important thing.  Rather than feeling as if I was avoiding it, I felt I was building up momentum that would carry me through it once it came up in the queue.

Moving from one task to the next seemed inevitable, not like I was making a decision.  I was just moving from one obvious thing in the present, to the next.  It also seemed that the actions took no time.  I knew that the clock was ticking, outside of the flow, and that when I finished I would see that some time had elapsed.  But in the moment, I had no sense that one task was taking a particular amount of time.  I had no time expectation, so my mind wasn't running the background task of Time Monitor, constantly whispering "this is taking longer than you thought it would," "this is taking too much time," "you feel anxious" etc.

When the most important thing became the next thing to do, I gathered up the documents and mailing supplies and set to work.  It wasn't as straightforward as it might have been, and my subconscious anticipation of that complexity may have been why I hadn't finished it sooner, but I was well into the flow, so one thing just followed another, taking no effort, taking no time, until it was done.