If I don’t do some exercise for a couple of days, I put on a lot of weight and look like a chocolate ball. If I don’t dye my hair I look like an aging grandmother, if I don’t do any work, I don’t have any money. If I don’t clean the house it will look like a farmyard and nobody will do it for me. Effort, effort, effort. Everything requires me to put in some effort. The problem is I’m tired of it.

I thought this morning, “How about I just let everything go? And put no effort in at all.” I wonder what would happen? I think things would get done eventually, because they have to. Things may not happen by themselves, but ultimately things would get done. They just would.

I keep reading books and articles by famous Gurus, which always talk about putting in less effort and achieving more. I think all this sounds like a good idea, but I’m sure it’s not a new idea and I’m sure everyone had already thought of it.

What I’d love to do is put no effort into anything, for a long time and see what happens.

I know I would be fat, grey, dirty, hungry, angry, lonely, poor and bored. But that doesn’t mean to say I won’t be happy. I could be.

So why don’t I try it? Because I don’t want people to see me with grey roots and one long hair growing off my chin. Conclusion: I must care too much about what people think.

Caring too much about what people think is a problem. I wish I could not care at all, like my neighbor. I saw her the other day, flinging rubbish at a dustbin, instead of putting rubbish in the dustbin, then when a passerby told her to put the rubbish in the dustbin she shouted obscenities along the lines of “Mind your own business, it’s nothing to do with you, if you keep talking to me I will punch you in the face and you’ll never been seen again.”

For me the obscenities took more courage than the actual flinging of the rubbish. This woman clearly did not care!

A part of me was envious- I wish I could be like that. Really not care at all what people that know me think, and secondly just do things like fling rubbish, hurl abuse, carry on like a bulldozer and think, so what?

Problem is, I was brought up to care what people think. My mother turned it into an art, and my father had a degree in it. What will the neighbours think? What will Aunty so and so think? We can’t do that, what will…????? Think!”

“But I don’t know …?????”

“But what will they think!”

This never made any sense to me, and what I realise now is that if I put in effort and care about what people think, then I can never really be myself because I will be trying to guess what Aunty so and so who I don’t know, have never met, and probably wouldn’t like anyway, thinks of me.

All I hear people say is “If you want to get what you want, just put more effort in. Work harder, put your mind to it, concentrate, just get on with it.”

I wish someone would say, “Put your feet up, don’t think about it, let everything go, hang loose, don’t bother brushing your teeth, washing your face, or cleaning your house, no one will notice, and who does that now days anyway? That’s so 1970’s. Let the dirt build up, you’ll be a lot happier. And if you want to tell your neighbours where to go, tell them! Who cares what they think, they’re just people you live next door to. Tell them they are a bunch of A*******!

I might live like this for a bit. I’m tired of effort and I really don’t care what people think. Either I’m getting old, or I’ve reached an all time new low.

I hope it’s both. I’m tired.