When the hurricanes come, when the tide wave washes over you with that feeling of complete anxious helplessness of not knowing where to turn first and which fire to start putting out, when it demands of you more than you thought you had in you it’s so easy to revert to self-pity and paralyzed passivity. All that is happening right now is not a burning issue, you made it burn, most of it can wait for you to weigh the options and find better solutions, most of it is not life threatening, and in most cases it is not only up to you to save the world – unless you’re some kind of global superhero we’re not aware of. And when these feelings come, when the shoulders are crunched bellow all the weight you carry, when the panic sets in that you’ll not be able to deal with it – SHRINK THE TIMEFRAME!

You are not omnipotent, you have no idea how things will pan out no matter what course of action you take and what will the next step be. So just do something, but do it intelligently. When you cat even imagine dealing with whatever it is you’re dealing with in a month, a year or two- you really don’t have to go that far. Do what needs to be done NOW. What can you do to push the situation towards a solution right now? Not in a few weeks, months or years but in this day, in the next hour, in this minute? If the answer is nothing, than it is not under your control. If the answer is obvious do it. When this hour passes you’ll take on the next one, and the next one and the next one, and at one point you’ll be out of the woods… or it will all be spectacularly destroyed and you’ll have to learn how to accept it.

Don’t burden yourself with millions of responsibilities on a timescale of years and months. Take things as they come, shrink the time frame to the smallest applicable and do something – right now, right here. Maybe you can’t fix everything but you can do something, and in most cases that will be enough. Solutions are not smooth homogenous paths but made up out of building blocks of different sizes and shapes and scattered through time.