I’m not sure if anyone else has feels this way, but this year has been…a lot. All of it is my doing of course, but still, normally I’m better at spacing stuff out. I used to follow the seasons of life fairly well. Somethings are more important than other at certain times. It worked. It made sense. It helped me focus on certain things and let go of, or backburner, other things. That didn’t work for me this year.
The difficult piece to manage has been that everything that has rose to the surface were larger items. For example, my family put a pool in to start the year off. That was a massive project. It wasn’t just just something that was a “focus” for the time. It was all consuming. It was the only thing I thought about. It was the only thing people asked me about. The consuming nature of that didn’t allow me to keep ideas simmering on the back burners. It shut everything down. It was like a season of a perpetual fire drill.
Operating for such a long time in that all consuming state really did a number on me. It knocked my life all out of balance. My diet fell off because I was stressed. My creativity was stunted because I couldn’t think of anything else, or I would want to rest my brain in front of the boob tube. I was good with that for a bit, but a bit turned into a little, a little into a while, and while into oh-crap-I-fell-off-the-wagon.
Piggybacking on AJ’s post last week, the start up energy was immense and I struggled to find enough to get over the hump. I found myself intimidated by that energy demand. It wasn’t until I had a conversation about it with a friend. Through that dialogue I realized the energy demand was not as great as I imagined. It was a lie. The issue for me was not energy, because the reality was that I just needed to do it. There is no actual energy needed. The problem was that I was out of rhythm. I was trying to mambo when the world was trying to salsa. Once I finally heard the tune, I was able to take the pressure off by finally taking a step in the right direction.
Each season has it’s own song, it’s own dance. The trouble is not the energy required to start. The trouble is finding the beat, then you just step in and start dancing. We get so caught up on “what if’s” and “maybes” that it takes the fun out of everything.
So, how do we get back into rhythm? Well, for me, it was journaling. I sat for a few days on my vacation and reviewed all of my priorities, my projects, my wants, my goals. Once I got them on a piece of paper, I could see the notes. Everything I wanted to work on was in harmony with each other. I was able to see that I was out of harmony with my life vision and goals. Getting it out of my head and onto a piece of paper helped me see in a way I couldn’t when I was ruminating on all woe’s of first world problems. I was able to see that I had started a conga line a long time ago. I had stepped away from it. Then I simply stepped back into it and kept that party going.
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