This Week's Mindful Morsel 🍪 | September 10, 2025 — full permission to toss it out

Happy sweet transitional Wednesday 💜

I’ve been spending time mulling over the rocks, pebbles, and sand analogy these past few days. If you’re not familiar, check out a good explanation here — the general gist is that what we prioritize first is often what takes up the most space, so we’re best served by prioritizing what’s most important (self care, relationships, etc.).

I think this is stellar mindfulness and self care, but the reason I’ve been mulling it over isn’t the general gist, but rather why we hardly focus on taking things out or sharing the load.

In our busy lives and schedules we’re often looking for ways to shift what’s already there and find the smallest ways to fit more in. We cram our calendars until we’re exhausted, exerting much of our creative energy in playing Tetris in our dayplanners rather than other creative endeavors (imagine what we’re robbing the art world of!). 

And why? And why aren’t we simplifying and seeing what we can take off our plates instead?

This has been on my mind so much because it’s a default behavior for me that I cycle through and work through and land in over and over. It comes up a lot when I’m struggling with time management and differentiating between what is best that I do, what I want to do, and what I feel like I should do.

I grew up in an environment where if I didn’t perform and hold my own, it was dangerous to my well being, and then I transitioned into jobs where companies expected more and more, and if you weren’t doing that and maxing out your capacity, you were lazy and unworthy. So my brain has a long-held and tightly wired connection between the quantity of things I do and self worth.

Over the last few years I’ve done so much work to loosen this connection and I’ve made incredible progress (toot toot! 🤘), but it’s hard when you’re wired like that so deeply. And I know many of you relate. 

We live in an era that has taught us to privatize tasks and hoard them to prove we’re worthy. But in that privatization, we’re breaking our jars and straying farther from a sense of community that we desperately need. 

So instead of finding the next smallest or more fluid thing to fill empty space with, let’s ditch the hyper-independence and honestly evaluate if we need to take on anything new, and if we decide to, let’s look at what we can remove from our jars to make space. What can someone help you with? What just doesn’t even need done? What’s stale and outdated and unnecessary? Full and whole-hearted permission to take those things out. 

Let me know how that lands and love yourself with a little more intention. 

With great care and gentle energy,