Why One and Done Doesn't Work

notes on seasonal changes, transitions & resurrection

I greet you today as a complicated mess of a person, and I’m not sad about that.

Lots of thoughts have been piling up in my head lately. We’re moving to a new place soon, so spring cleaning has meant spring purging as well, and I really do love a good purge.

It’s Easter weekend, a holiday about resurrection that I grew up celebrating through a Christian evangelical lens but now have complicated feelings about.

And I’m thinking in general about burnout, boundaries, care, and transitions as they come and go throughout our lives.

Here’s what I really want to say today: the one-and-done doesn’t work. I don’t think it ever really has.

The term “one-and-done” definitely has multiple meanings (feel free to check them out on Wiktionary or Urban Dictionary) but here I’m referring to the tendency in America for us to do something once a year or one time and think that we will move on smoothly from it.

We talk about cleaning and purging once a year at springtime. Really!? Who has ever done a deep clean of their home ONCE in an entire calendar year and been okay with that?

We set goals once a year in the Gregorian Calendar for New Years and hope those goals follow through until the next year, which often leads, of course, to feelings of failure.

We grieve one thing and think it will fix us for all future griefs only to find out that’s not the way grief works.

And, in honor of this complicated holiday, we name a big resurrection, a huge righting-of-wrongs, and claim that it fixes all things for all time.

The one-and-done doesn’t work, because we are not linear as humans.

I know, I know. If you’ve read any of my stuff anywhere out there, you know that I care about the seasons, about cycles. But we cannot get away from them! The seasons around us show us how to live, to breathe, how to heal.

The realms of resistance throughout my book offer a way to see the world and practice care and resistance through these cycles (buy my book here if you haven’t already!).

Cycles of grief show us what it means to name difficult things and not give up on the journey.

And our goals? Those are mean to transform alongside us, not hold us to faulty patterns or boxes waiting to be checked.

We need flexibility and care, and that means one-and-done won’t work for our healing.

I need a reset in one way or another weekly, and maybe you do, too.

I need to set new goals monthly, because things change.

I need a “new year” every season as the world around me changes and shows me the way home.

I need resurrection again and again and again in a world that is broken and hurting and asking for something better than what we’ve created or been given.

So here’s what I leave with you:

what transition are you holding?

what are you purging?

what can you hold onto and let go of?

Hold on, then let go.

Hold on, then let go.

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Friends, it’s been a month since Living Resistance came out and I’m so grateful to the ways you’ve been showing up, reading my words, and supporting me. Thank you again and again!

Stick with me here, because in the next week or so I’ll be sharing some really excited news about upcoming events around the country and other exciting things happening in my world!