I’m currently working through The Art of Stopping Time by Pedram Shojai. It’s a book structured in one hundred days’ worth of mindfulness prompts and reflections.
This is what came out of day one.
I had a conversation with my therapist recently about energy.
I felt like my energy levels were like a massive wave in the ocean. A gigantic tsunami of energy would appear. I would be motivated. I would be able to get lots of things done. I would feel fantastic.
Then the wave would plunge downward to surprising depths. I would be tired and feeling down for days afterwards. I would beat myself up for not completing tasks, wondering why I suddenly couldn’t motivate myself to do anything, even though just one day ago, I was positively bubbling with energy. What was up with that?
The conversation turned to pacing and a scarcity mindset. I had managed to convince myself that these waves were scarce and that the energy wouldn’t stay around for long.
Therefore, when they did appear, I would work and work and work and work… trying to get as much done as possible, and then burn myself out, forcing myself to spend the next few days recovering all the energy I had spent.
When my therapist suggested that I didn’t need to use all the energy up in one go, that I could pace myself, recognise my limits, and stretch this energy out over multiple days (maybe even keep a steady balance of rest and work), it seemed like a completely wild idea to me.
What? Rest? Recognise when my body asks for a break? That is NONSENSE!
It is this conversation with my therapist which popped up in my head when charging into day one of The Art of Stopping Time by Pedram Shojai.
Day one in this one-hundred-day mindfulness exploration has me assembling my life garden.
I am looking at the different aspects of my life that are important to me, Family, Friends, Career, etc., and imagining them as different plants. These plants need water (aka energy – water and energy seem to be closely linked in this post).
This first chapter has me asking myself if I have enough water to feed all my plants. Can I tend to my garden? Do some plants need more water than others at the moment?*
*If I cast my eyes slightly to the left or right, I am met with a houseplant gasping for water. Perhaps this metaphor is a little too on the nose.
Shojai suggests that we should not cultivate more than ten plants in our life garden. I have managed to restrain myself to a tasteful eight plants. Although one of them is ‘creativity’, which feels a little vague. Is it writing? Blogging? Cross stitch? That guitar that hangs in my bedroom and gathers dust? Uh… yes, it is all of those. As a very creative person, this plant is something I really want to put a lot of water into*.
*I guess that’s what I am doing right now with this blog post. Go me!
But even with eight plants, this garden feels a little starved for water in some places. My French practice, for example, is definitely suffering. I have been a bit checked out recently in classes. I have been struggling to keep up.
To pop back to the therapist conversation at the start, I think I have been doing the equivalent of gathering a bucket of water and dumping it all over one of my plants and ignoring the rest.
I look back at my “Job Week 2026”. I approached that week saying that I had to apply to one job each day. This was actually a good example of giving my ‘career’ plant a bit of water that it needed each day, but not over-watering it. There were times during that week that I didn’t feel I was doing ‘enough’, that I wasn’t working ‘hard enough’ on my career plans… but I finished that week not feeling burnt out and ready to keep on going.
Then, when my ‘Family’ plant suddenly needed a lot of water on the weekend, I was able to handle it. And it needed a LOT of water.
Pacing. Just enough water. Energy levels. Allowing myself that space.
It feels surprisingly challenging – and perhaps that is a good thing.
I need to get better at tending to my life garden*.
(*and my actual houseplants, sorry houseplants)
Rhi Axtell - Writer 
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