I think a lot of people are still waiting for some imagined future before incorporating more of what they love into their day to day life. Whether that imagined future involves retirement, summer vacation, when your kids graduate, when you partner/marry, when you separate or divorce, or when you lose weight or gain muscle…when we get licensed…start a business or any other imagined future.
A Whole Life
It is easy to think that you must earn what you love, like earning your dessert when you are a child and are told you must eat your vegetables first. It’s true that having some discipline and foundation as it relates to putting first things first is important. Eating your vegetables – just like cultivating discipline around what is necessary – can add to your overall quality of life. Your life will ideally be whole. Not in the future but right now.
You in Relationship to Others
I think it is important for therapists, entrepreneurs, service professionals and those in the helping professions to cultivate regular practices around what you love. In this case I don’t mean centering your life around your children, family, friends or even pets. I mean giving some serious thought and consideration for what you enjoy that is separate from your relationship to others. I find that many people hold a primary identity around their work. When your work is purposeful and meaningful it is easy to forego cultivating other interests. It’s easy to tell yourself that your work is so important and that your family, friends and even religious identity is so important that you don’t have room or space for anything else.
Who Are You?
I think it is important to create space and incorporate more of what you love in day to day life as a practice of identifying yourself and identifying with your self.
- Who are you?
- Who are you separate from your identification with others?
- Who are you outside of being a parent; or sibling or spouse or therapist? Who are you and what you do you enjoy?
- What do you do for fun? When you have time alone how do you spend it? When you have time alone do you look forward to it?
- How can you give yourself permission to incorporate more of what you love in your day to day life? Did you used to create that space and now you don’t?
- Are you incorporating what you love in your day to day life now?
- If so, how do you maintain that space for yourself?
Someday is Now
What are you putting off that you hope to give your attention to someday? What if you made that someday now? Or at least a little bit every day or every week? It is important to have a self that can not be taken away when life presents us with the inevitable losses surrounding our identification to our relationship with others. You may be many things to many people. I challenge you to allow yourself to be a whole being to and for yourself.
Copyright © 2020 Ruby Blow. All rights reserved.
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