Things that weigh heavy on the mind: A partly-completed jigsaw puzzle, spread out on my dining table so that I have to eat around it. Books I bought and want to read, but every time I look at them I decide not to. A quilting project I started last summer, paused with one stage completed, carefully folded in a storage box, all clean and ironed, ready to go to the next stage. A collection of beautiful inks for my fountain pens, some of them in my desk and some downstairs in a tidy plastic box with a lid, only two bottles of which I am actually using. Cans of food I wanted to eat at some point and keep deciding not to (I see you, canned spinach). Samplers that my husband’s ancestors made they were children, lovely, old, dark with age, and gloomy.

They do weigh heavy on my mind, all those things waiting for me to do something about them. I feel sometimes like an opossum with her brood hanging onto her, all of them red-eyed, grinning, and faintly naked. Or someone trying to jam everything I could ever possibly want into one of those carry-on suitcases that have to fit into a frame. That despite the fact that everything is very, very tidy indeed in my house.

But being organized is not the same thing as being free. It doesn’t matter how tidy things are, or how organized, if all those neatly stored things are yammering at me from inside their plastic boxes, or from their shelves, or from my dining table. I mean, there’s only so much “mind over matter” my brain can handle; sometimes the matter wins the battle.

Of course, some of my undone tasks I can take care of. This morning, for instance, I vacuumed the first floor and cleaned the second floor bathroom, because those tasks were whispering sadly to me too (it’s winter, so despite my shoe tray and my diligent changing of shoes when I come in the house, my hardwood floors tend to crunch quietly after a little bit). I’m also going to hang those damn pictures I got framed last week, wrap my grandchild’s Christmas present, and put some of my unread books in the little free library around the corner. Those are all tasks I can complete, so I might as well.

Sometimes I just have face some of my projects and admit I’m not going to do them, maybe not ever, and I have to give up on them.

I swept the jigsaw puzzle off my dining table back into its box first thing this morning. The hell with it. And I took the samplers off the wall. If my adult kid wants them, fine, and if not, I’ll figure out a way to get rid of them. Someone will want those books I’m not reading. There are other books waiting for my attention, books that deserve to be read. But not those ones.

I still plan to get around to that quilt one of these days, though.