What if it's actually easy?

Call the dentist and make an appointment. Prepare the documents for a visa. Cancel a subscription you no longer need. Congratulate a colleague on their birthday. Return clothes that didn’t fit.

Just writing these sentences makes me break out in a cold sweat. I hate these kind of organizational chores. Things that sit somewhere between work and leisure. Bureaucracy in the broadest sense.

Unfortunately, life (and especially life as an immigrant) seems to mostly consist of exactly these kinds of tasks. So I’m always looking for ways to stop being afraid of them.

A few days ago, I came across an idea I want to try. Oliver Burkeman, author of The Imperfectionist, suggests asking yourself a simple question before starting a task:

What if this is actually easy?

A large part of the anxiety these chores create comes from uncertainty. What if the visa is rejected? What if I don’t know what to say on the phone, or which language to use? What if they refuse to exchange the clothes?

But asking yourself “what if it’s easy?” shifts your attention to specifics

“…to the actions you can actually take. The point isn’t to imagine some parallel universe where the task would be effortless. It’s simply to allow yourself to consider that it might, in fact, be easy in this universe.

I realize this sounds like the worst kind of denial — as if you could get what you want by commanding the universe to align with your wishes. But in practice, it can work surprisingly well. Not because it’s some mystical order to the cosmos, but because it reminds you not to fall back into the old habit of making things more complicated than they need to be, or adding a sense of painful effort where none is actually required.”

Or, as one of my classmates used to answer when people asked how she was the only person in class who could solve difficult math problems:

“You just sit down and do it.”