My friend Lucy Ann Moll is leading a six week, once a week series on REST. LucyAnnMoll.com is one of my favorite go to places to drink in community and check in with my heart. This week she wrote about margins in your daily life. It is an area I have been focusing on as well. Creating more specific margins of peace in my life. As a high energy, creative soul it is easy for me to allow myself to swirl my life into such a tizzy that it doesn’t stop spinning for hours. Plate juggling is something I have learned to do well in handling many projects and tasks at once as though there is some honor or glory to do so. The cost has too often been exhaustion, neglect and eventually relationship damage. I grew up believing if you worked hard enough you could have it all, but it turns out that all isn’t what it is cracked up to be. 🙂
During the early part of the year I worked with Allyson Lewis’s The 7 Minute Solution launch. Her book focuses on how to have a more meaningful life through focusing daily on five things before eleven a.m. and systems of time management that can help you protect and engage in a more meaningful life. I believe in the work of that book and I diligently used Allyson’s planner for the first quarter of 2012. I had to get tickled at its simple lines for the hours of work, for my life appointments would take 4x as many spaces to keep up with what I do in a day.
That was a clue.
When the going gets tough on my time schedule, I am the first one to suffer, nurturing my family is second ball I drop, and if life gets hard enough on one project, my other clients may have less immediate access to me for a day or three. The going was getting tough too many weeks in a row oh say since 2009.
The reality?
It wasn’t even about business or financial success. It was about being enough.
Despite degrees, experience, awards and accolades, a happy marriage and children who are approaching adulthood without destruction, I was still in some sort of climb to find some unknown, un-named accomplishment that would make up for my inadequacies….all of them.
Margins against the less than glamorous parts of my humanity….like being twice divorced….or not being Barbie physically…or or or…
This year of seeking more meaningful life and daily peace has led me to refocus what it is that matters about what I do and why I do it…it’s will be most likely a lifetime quest. It’s hard to look into your life and not like what you see repeating, but in the honesty of that moment change can occur…and while it is not always permanent, new habits have to be learned, choosing to change and acting on it can happen in a instant…what a gift that is, that we can choose to learn, to change, to be and act differently….and start becoming the person we hope to be.
Sweetie – thank you for this today. We all juggle too much, mostly because we think we need to, but your challenge to look deeper is really important. I know I struggle with my own inadequecies, which in turn make me take on things I should say no to. Kind of a vicious cycle….doing too much makes me do less of the things that are truly important and that in turn makes me feel more inadequate! GAH! You are right that it is going to be lifetime quest – no easy changes, but it’s nice to know that I’m in it with great people like you!!
Sweetie – thank you for this today. We all juggle too much, mostly because we think we need to, but your challenge to look deeper is really important. I know I struggle with my own inadequecies, which in turn make me take on things I should say no to. Kind of a vicious cycle….doing too much makes me do less of the things that are truly important and that in turn makes me feel more inadequate! GAH! You are right that it is going to be lifetime quest – no easy changes, but it’s nice to know that I’m in it with great people like you!!