delete, delete, delete + breathe
This morning my son asked me a question that only a child could ask with complete sincerity: if every single day of his life had been his birthday, how old would he be?
At the very same time, I was multitasking and that’s how I managed to delete my entire 2026 to-do list.
Gone. Irretrievable. A full year of “plans” erased with one distracted click.
(It lived as a recurring Google Calendar event that I edited week by week and saved “as is.” Not the most unshakeable system, I know.)
When I told my husband what had happened, he paused and said, “Maybe it all needed to be deleted.”
That landed more deeply than I expected. I had felt panicked. Like all those bulleted items in my Google Calendar were actually holding my life together. And sure, maybe I will wake up in the middle of the night remembering I need to make a dentist appointment but other than that, I think it’ll be just fine.
And after a few expletives after I purposely shut myself in the pantry, I felt a sense of relief. A kind of exhale moved through my body, the sensation of space opening where structure and obligation had lived for so long.
We talk endlessly about adding - more goals, more offerings, more content, more plans for the future. Very few of us are taught how to subtract. Multitasking is praised as efficiency, but more often it’s fragmentation, a nervous system stretched across too many timelines at once, a mind trying to manage an imagined future while the present slips by.
Meanwhile, my son was fully inside his question. He wasn’t concerned with calendars or productivity or the pressure of time. He had no idea what a to-do list was or why mommy started sweating profusely and put herself in timeout in the pantry. He was simply curious, wondering how age works if you stop counting the way adults do. His presence felt like a mirror.
And then another realization arrived: if this really has been the year of the snake, all I have been doing is shedding skin.
Layer after layer — identities, attachments, ways of working and being that once fit but no longer do. Honestly, I don’t know how there’s any of me left. And yet, despite how uncomfortable it’s been, this year has been exactly what I needed.
Shedding isn’t graceful. It’s raw and exposing, leaving you tender and unsure of who you are without the old casing. But nothing new can breathe beneath old skin. Nothing essential can emerge if we’re still clinging to what has already outgrown us.
So maybe deleting the plans wasn’t a mistake. Maybe it was the final peel.
We don’t need to delete our lives to create space, but we might need to loosen our grip on our plans. Less multitasking. Less hoarding of future versions of ourselves. More presence. More listening. More trust in what wants to emerge now.
For today, I’m letting 2026 be a bit blank. No to-do list, no content calendar, no over-engineered plan. Just some space.
DELETE DELETE DELETE.
And maybe, finally, breathe.
