I thought I didn’t want to work today
After a lot of self-care yesterday (Sunday), tidying the house and consciously choosing not to busy myself, I thought I’d feel rested and ready to go, coming into the start of the week. Not so. I feel like I need another Sunday, and that I only just scraped the surface of the stillness that I’d been seeking.
When doing nothing feels that good, who on earth would want to “get shit done?”
Lately I’ve been spending too much of my “productive” time feeling strained in my chest. I’m feeling a sense of urgency at the moment. I have some big ideas that I’m trying to make real, but I’m pushing too fast and spending too much time in “head mode” on a screen — disconnected from the yin — the actual source of my creative power.
Do you ever struggle to find balance between hustling and mindfully cruising?
I’m beginning to think it has a lot less to do with what we’re doing and much more to do with how we do it. It’s rarely the work that is the problem. It’s almost always the hyper-stressed state of being we’ve married to the work.
When I’m on my phone or laptop longer than 5 or 10 minutes, I can literally feel my organs yelling at me, my jaw tensing, my breath shortening and my attention scurrying frantically to some non-existent future place
BUT the screen is not the root of the issue.
I can be quick to blame the devil (the substance or behaviour) but this guilt-hate cycle only prevents me from finding a better way. So as I lay on the bedroom floor this morning, hands on belly, breathing deep and staring at the leaves on my pot plants, I asked myself “what does a better way feel like?”
It most definitely doesn’t feel like:
- going to bed hating myself because I’ve numbed my mind for hours.
- wanting to sledgehammer my stupidsmartphone and throw into the ocean every. fucking. day.
- allowing my boundaries to be eroded by “just another minute” on my phone
But surely it wouldn’t be mentally or financially sustainable to sit at the dining table drinking tea and drawing pictures of birds underwater wearing scuba gear. I can’t relax all the time, can I? And that’s when I realised, I didn’t have to figure out “my perfect day”. I just had to make today a little better in some way.
So rather than sitting on a screen in and stubbornly trying to write some “good content” I decided to try something that felt more sustainable. I made my cup of liquorice tea, got out a fresh, lined A4 workbook left over from uni and I started to write about why I didn’t want to work today.
What I learned is that I actually did want to work. I just didn’t want to feel I was living a lie. I wanted my work to feel like “love made visible” (Kahlil Gibran) and not like “stress productised” (Jack White). Rather than surrender to one extreme or the other, I calmly stumbled (this is apparently a thing) upon a middle way — writing it all on paper and then typing it up.
Interestingly, as a result, I’ve probably spent less time writing and I’ve enjoyed the process more. It appears I can do pretty epic shit whilst feeling fantastic if I allow myself to find more effortless pathways into and out of productivity. I used to be more of a ‘forcer’, but then I realised that I wouldn’t want to do this to anyone else that I loved or cared about. So why me?
It’s a skill and I’m no master — I will force again at some point — but unlocking the doors within our bodies or minds is alway better than prying them open.