How Do You Eat an Elephant?

There are a few pieces of wisdom I have gleaned over the years that I like to pull out and share with my kids from time to time, in part just to see if they are still capable of rolling their eyes all the way back in their heads. This is one of them: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Or the way I put it to my 5th grader, who was overwhelmed by his homework last night: "How many problems do you need to work on RIGHT NOW? Just one." 

All he could see was pages and pages of math problems with blanks out beside them for answers he didn't know off the top of his head, and it felt like too much, like something he would NEVER get through, and so he didn't want to even try. But he didn't need to do all the problems. He only needed to do one problem: the next problem. 

The reason this bit of wisdom is eye-roll worthy is because, in general, people don't want to be reminded that the hard thing they are facing is, in fact, doable, because then they will actually have to try. It's much easier to give in to the overwhelm, to say we can't, to believe the problem is simply too big. If we can convince ourselves that those things are true, then we can give ourselves permission not to do hard things, and it doesn't have to be our fault but simply just the magnitude of the problem. But that's a cop out.  

It makes perfect sense to my adult brain to tell a 10-year-old that he only needs to work on the very next math problem, and that if he does that over and over, he will soon be finished with the night's homework. Also, my adult brain looks at that 5th grade math, and thinks, "It's not even really that hard." That is NOT how my son looks at it, though, because the concepts are still new to him, and he doesn't have much experience yet with those kinds of problems, so they seem unreasonably difficult, like trying to eat an elephant. 

But give me adult problems, and suddenly I'm just exactly like a 5th grader who doesn't want to do any of the problems because all I can see is all the things I don't know. And while it may seem easy to tell someone else how to eat their elephant, it's harder to start taking bites of your own. I can't tell you how many times I've been paralyzed with the overwhelming feeling that I need to solve all the problems of my adult life right now but I don't know how. I look at all of them at once and don't have answers for most of them off the top of my head and feel I will therefore NEVER work my way through all of them--or maybe any of them--and I want to quit then and there. I have always found that I learn more when I teach others, and I'm thankful that coaching my 5th grader through his homework gave me the opportunity to be reminded how to eat an elephant. I don't need to solve all of life's problems right now. I just need to chew the bite that's in my mouth and then take the next one.