Keeping Up With it All...

Sometimes I have to admit that I struggle to keep up with everything life seems to throw at us...

Maybe this is related to the fact that I was never (naturally) inclined to be an "Energizer Bunny" type person, always in motion and always doing things.

Of course, society teaches us that not only can we have it all, but we should feel somehow guilty or "defective" if we are not striving to "have it all..."

Which I — personally speaking — think is just a shame!

As I have written about before, I don't think a happy life springs from a desire to have it "ALL," but from having exactly the right amount.

Sadly, we often end up creating lives — fully believing we are on the right path, at the time — that are out of balance, and places a great deal of burden and stress on us...

Getting from "it all" to "exactly the right amount" is a bit like trying to unburden yourself from a huge pile of credit card and consumer debt: It's easier said than done... and just because we have set our intention doesn't mean we'll see results anytime soon.

When I "changed direction" in my early 30's and headed towards self-employment, it didn't happen overnight.

And it wasn't just about becoming self-employed, it was also about changing my entire life.

We humans are a funny lot... the sense that we claim our lives would be easier if only we had "more" of something: More money, more space, more love, more joy... but as soon as we have that "more," we're already planning how to get even more.

No matter what, we tend to grow to fill the available space.

I often think a large part of the reason I was successful at becoming self-employed was that the first thing I did was change my life, not my work.

It's common for us to go about things "backwards." We take a job with more hours and more responsibility and stress in order to support our lifestyle, but very seldom to we adapt our lifestyle to enable us to pursue the work that is meaningful to us.

At the time, I recognized that I was "agreeing" to take a 70% pay cut to become a free-lance writer, so I ended up selling my house and trading a $1900 mortgage payment for $850 in rent; using the equity to pay off my car to not have a car payment and gave up a bunch of rather expensive habits.

It's not that I don't enjoy the comforts of life — I definitely do — but we often fill our lives with a lot of "fluff" for little reason other than "our friends are doing it" and maybe just because "we can."

I'm going to skip over "ego expenditures" because that's a whole other kettle of fish!

Truth be known, I became a much more relaxed — and kinder — person once I let go of the whole idea of trying to keep up with it all.

But lately I have been feeling that other paradigm increasingly encroaching on my reality, perhaps because the reality of a stagnant economy and higher inflation has turned my smaller life into something larger, relatively speaking.

It's a bit like riding your bicycle at 20km/h into a 20km/h wind makes it feel like you're actually going closer to 40km/h. But you're not, even though you're doing the work to keep up with your surroundings.

Then again, it could be that I just need a holiday. Or a change of scenery.

Even though I actually had that, recently!

Maybe I just needed to vent and get it out of my system...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!

How about you? Are you pretty good at "keeping up with it all?" Or does it sometimes feel like you're running into a headwind? What would change things? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 2024.08.16 00:16PDT
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