Are you hanging on?

Sometimes life is just too busy. Too fast. We don’t hang about but we feel like we are barely hanging on…

When you are drowning in a sea of bureaucracy at work and a tide of ever-growing demands, when all your priorities are becoming urgent priorities… How do you hang on?

When you get home and don’t have the energy to make a cup of tea, never mind the dinner, how do you hang on?

This week I have skipped all three of my yoga classes because I was just bone tired… But did I just hang about and chill out, take a bath, read a book, go to bed early?

No, I did not. I paced about aimlessly, becoming agitated at all the things I needed to do. I went to a visit a friend and we did the kind of work stuff you would only do late on a Wednesday night for the love of it! I mentally created more clutter…

And today at work, I watched as my colleague physically filled up the table with all the “stuff”  we need to do, and I became aware of the mental stress we place on ourselves by always trying to cram more in. We didn’t get through that pile – physically or mentally. We were never going to.

Tomorrow afternoon at 3pm, I am breaking that “stuff” down into something less chaotic.  Something that helps us see the wood despite the trees. One can’t exist without the other and before the wind comes howling, I want to know which trees are most at risk of falling.

When life is so busy, we often just try to push our way through that wood.  We never take the time to look and to listen, to see and to hear.  It’s almost as though we are afraid that, if we stop, the wood will swallow us up, that we will be lost in its darkness or crushed!  We don’t realise we are already allowing it to do that.   We don’t realise that, if we stop for a moment, we might just see which trees we can keep and which trees need to go.   What are you hanging on to that’s just not that important any more?

So tomorrow, I am going to order those priorities.  And I am damn well going to read my book with a cuppa when I get home! I am going to just hang around!  Want to come join me?

So when life gets crazy busy again, we will at least know the healthiest trees to hang on to!