What most people call time management or setting boundaries, I call the work of crossing through little gates.

Gates are moments where we say no to one thing in order to say yes to something else.

Gates don’t always take the shape of doors, however. Sometimes, they look like thresholds, portals, crossroads, moments of truth, healing crises, or emergencies. When I’m approaching a big gate, I sometimes imagine myself walking through a landscape. My gates have looked like mountain cliffs, raging rivers, neverending deserts, grassy fields, and windy roads.

Beside each gate lives a gatekeeper.

In the old stories, gatekeepers appear as mystical beings—three-headed dogs, dragons, and wise teachers.

In reality, the gatekeeper lives within us.

The gatekeeper tells us that to pass, we must pay a price—say no to a request, invest money, end a relationship, turn off our phone, or close the door on an opportunity.

Despite the modern-day trope that we should never give up, sometimes, we are called to let go of a project that is no longer alive or close a chapter that’s no longer ours to write. Despite Christianity’s insistence that anything less than til death do us part is a failure, even callings are not always forever.

In addition to the action we must take to cross through a gate, at each gate, we must also always let go of something internal as well—old stories, behaviors, identities and ways of being that no longer serve us and that hold us back from becoming who we’re called to be now.

This doesn’t mean getting rid of any part of ourselves or becoming a better person. It means including and transcending everything we’ve been until now, becoming more fully ourselves than we’ve ever been before.

When we let go of what no longer serves us to step toward what’s calling us, we begin to embody a new person—a person who shares their ideas, a person who takes care of themself, a person who leads, a person who pauses, a person who says no, a person who says yes.

We live life at the little gates.

Although the big gates captivate our attention—changing jobs, starting an organization, completing a project, going to school, launching a campaign, taking on a new leadership role, having a baby, moving home, undergoing a health procedure—they come only once in a while.

Most great distances are traversed not with one big leap but with many small steps.

We live life at the little gates—small choice points such as deciding whether to go to bed, reduce expenses, dedicate time to a morning practice, have a difficult conversation, speak up at a meeting, sign up for a class, call a legislator, attend a protest, look for a mentor, ask for help, ask someone on a date, say no to a request, or take some other step forward.

It’s at the little gates that we choose our boundaries and decide where we’ll dedicate our time.

And, choosing is often painful. In a world with so much injustice and unmet need, it can hurt to say no, especially when we care deeply about the state of the world or work in a caring profession and are saying no to real-life people with real-life needs. Having to constantly choose between safeguarding our own mental and emotional wellbeing or sacrificing ourselves to care for our communities is an impossibly shitty task.

Of course, there are plenty of practices for mitigating the shittiness and overwhelming ourselves less. But no practice will ameliorate the fact that in late-stage capitalism, most of us must make money to meet our needs and are expected to meet our needs as single people or nuclear families, despite the fact that we’re physiologically designed to thrive in larger groups and communities. And no practice will erase the fact that our choices can feel so small when the world’s problems are so big.

Time management is grief work.

Although most self-help teachers talk about saying no as if we were only letting go of obligations that drain us and things we’d rather not do,