An Inventory Before Autumn

Every season I do a quiet inventory of what I've stopped doing.

Not what I've failed at. What I've deliberately, consciously put down.

This is harder to track than what I've started doing, because the starting of things is visible and acknowledged — people say oh, you're doing that now? Nobody notices the things you've stopped. They simply stop happening, and the space they leave fills with something else, usually.

What I've stopped doing since last autumn:

I've stopped tracking the grocery situation in real time. The pantry has an owner now. When we run out of something, there is a person who knows this and whose problem it is, and that person is not me. This sounds like a small thing. It occupied a surprising amount of my background attention.

I've stopped preparing for conversations I'm not having. The rehearsing of how to raise a difficult subject — the silent, private iteration of how to say a thing that hasn't been said — is exhausting labour I'd been performing alone for years. The conversations are different when they're not so thoroughly pre-processed. More actual. More joint.

I've stopped apologising for the state of the house when we have visitors. The state of the house is now a shared problem, and I am not its sole custodian.

What stopping these things made possible: a bit more room to be in the house without managing it.