Those carefree moments where I’m truly able to breathe deeply and just let myself flow with music and laughter. It’s the moment that catches you dancing in the kitchen while you’re washing dishes. You are just listening to an old time favorite song that deserves to be played loudly and sung like you’re the one performing it. The real life moments is what I call these. When the burden of living seems lighter for a brief moment and you wonder what you were worrying about in the first place about it. That’s a good natural feeling and it’s the most natural feeling we can get to living our best life.
I get wrapped up in work sometimes; my job that is. What can I say it gets intense and there are hard deadlines, lots of pressure and many people who just don’t give a f if you have something to do with your family or not, there’s work to do. That type of pressure builds until I feel that way all the time. It makes me cut to the chase on a lot of things so I can rush back to work and keep up with the latest must have now demands. Some days being myself is entirely lost in the exhaustion of the day. There is no room for that among it all and I’m too tired for it anyway. Maybe tomorrow.
By the time the weekend comes around, I do my best to relax and let loose. Really I do. The truth is it takes time to unwind and feel like myself again. The one that feels like turning on the music and enjoying an afternoon doing something I love with the family. I believe the reason so many of us think the weekends are too short is because by the time we do relax and unwind it’s Sunday afternoon. It’s time to start thinking of the week and all it has packed in it that repeats what we just spent the last 48 hours recuperating from. That good natural feeling of just being ourselves is sometimes only a glimpse on the weekends.
Our struggle is in finding that balance between all the things that are holding us back from being ourselves and having those good moments. What most of us do now is the farthest thing from our natural state. We were not made to be tired all the time, sedentary in our lifestyle and unhappy. That goes against our make up in our cells! Yet the necessity of needing to pay bills means putting up with a lot to make that possible. Most of now we do it is unnatural too.
The one silver lining in 2020 was that I changed jobs so that even after the pandemic I could stay at home with my family. I believed it would give me more time with them and I could create more of those moments of good feelings. In many ways it has yet work still is relentless in it’s demands and expectations of my time. The one thing I will say about working at home is it has provided me the stark realization of just how much those demands wear on my life. How many of those good natural feeling moments it actually steals from me.
Many of us feel we don’t have a choice but to sacrifice those good feeling moments to secure our lifestyle. Sometimes it is just necessary right? What choice do we actually have in the matter? That was the lie I told myself for a long time too. I fell for it believing a job was the only option and whatever they wanted they got from me no matter the cost it took on my health, sanity or family. I did that because I knew the importance that paycheck was to my family. There wasn’t a plan b if this didn’t work out and so far I had not won the lottery.
In one of those moments when I was once again working late on something that had to be done I told myself this lie again. The lie that I didn’t have a choice. It was true I didn’t in that moment have a choice but I had a bigger choice that I had been ignoring because it too was described as impossible and well just plain stupid. That bigger choice was building my own business. Building my way out of this situation that stole all my good moments and left me a shell of myself on the weekends needing to recuperate. Life shouldn’t be about working until there is nothing left and then needing to sleep and have no energy for anything fun on the weekends. There’s more to life than just wishing it were Friday every week.
I was tired of just dreaming about it too. I had reached that place we all get to when we’ve just had enough and are ready to do something about it. I wanted my good moments back and as many of them as I could pack into every single day. Not just saving them for Sunday afternoons when I had finally restored my energy and felt myself coming back out of my shell. I had to do this for me and my family. This had all taken so much from me that I finally understood why people get so excited about retirement but then died within a few years of it. By that point we are just tired and our health so poor we can’t do our best living even then! I didn’t want to live like that. It wasn’t good enough for me.
It has not been easy building a business while working like I have but I have held tightly to do it. I have figured out how to get it into the nooks and crannies of my day to allow progress to occur quietly in the background while I still face the fires of my job. There will be a day when I don’t have to be quiet about it anymore. The time is coming when my work is things that bring as many good moments as what my family does. The day is coming when what I do for pay is what fills my heart too. Those good moments happening fluidly in all areas of my life. That is more than a pipe dream too.
Just like anything we want in our life we have to work for it but I have decided what I work for these days is different than it used to be. For me changing the how I work is where the key to this issue lies. We all have to work so I decided to work for something I love, that leaves me feeling energized versus exhausted. I was willing to figure out how to create that in my life so that all areas of it felt like good moments were possible and not something to save for when I could retire. Some may call that unrealistic but I dare them to describe another option where life can be full of good moments otherwise.
If you’re looking for how to redefine what it means to have good moments in your life, visit my website at dragonspitapothecary.com and contact me. Together let’s fill our days with natural good feelings.