Well, it’s technically still Friday, but apologies for the late post!
I got sidetracked last night, which is usually my post writing time, by making a special trip over to my mom’s house after not hearing from her all day. She was fine, just having some computer difficulty which I was able to help out with, but got back after midnight and forgot about my writing.
I usually take the whole week to think about what to write about as well, and this week was just one of those really busy weeks.
Busy is not necessarily a bad thing…
but it can certainly have some downsides, like when we’re constantly too busy to do other important things.
Also, I know I need a certain amount of downtime that I don’t like to sacrifice to being “busy”. Occasionally, having to do more stuff is unavoidable. For example, I had to fit in 3 trips to help my mom this week.
What’s important for me, is to understand when “busy” is legit and when I’m using it as an excuse to NOT do something else.
It took me awhile to even realize that’s how I was often using “busy” though.
Busy can also take the place of facing an issue. I was busy A LOT after Mario died. Staying busy meant not having to face that he was no longer here. But that kind of busy was also a very different kind. For some reason, I was laser focused on cleaning and house stuff. There is probably some psychological explanation to that, but I’m unaware of what it might be. I could have thrown myself fully into work and been busy that way, but that’s not how it played out. Honestly, in a situation like that, I think you just have to go with the flow and not try to force something. You’re already going through emotional hell, so putting extra demands on yourself will not work out well.
What I’ve tried to do over the last few years is get better at prioritizing too. I think being able to prioritize activities and tasks helps me to be more efficient with my time. Like anything else you want to get good at, it takes practice. I feel like I’m only about half way there.
I did have a minor breakthrough late last year and started offloading work tasks that I was procrastinating on. The thing I had to get over was that it also meant I was making less money by doing so. That was a big hurdle to get over. As a small business owner, it can also be really tough to let go of the reins. Luckily, I have team members I can fully trust with the tasks. It’s also given me more time to to focus my attention on things that come easier to me. I’m actually writing for my own business blog again. Last weekend, I had a table at a small convention. And of course, it’s given me a little more downtime so that I can recoup my energy and do my best creative work.
Another trip around the sun…
My birthday was a couple days ago and while I’m chronologically another year older, I remain committed to my “age is just a number” mentality that I’ve pretty much had since reaching the milestone of 21 (because after 21, there really need not be any more “age milestones” in my book!). I spent the day working, got a couple cool gifts from a friend, and went over to my mom’s and ate cake and played Yahtzee. The only wild thing that happened was an unexplainable, loud noise while we were playing Yahtzee. After a thorough exploration of what could of caused it, nothing could be found, and we later joked that it was my dad sending a birthday greeting from the great beyond.
I consider all of March my “birthday month” though. So I’ve already had a nice birthday lunch with my father-in-law and next week I’ll be heading to the mountains for a day or two of snowboarding.
I’m itching to go camping again now that I have the teardrop trailer, so I may try and get in a quick overnight at the coast or something before the month is up.
Aging and the power of the mind…
Speaking of aging, I’m all about staying healthy and young at heart as long as I possibly can. I’ll frequently put on random podcasts on topics of interest and alignment to my goals while I’m doing other things. I stumbled onto one where the guest was Ellen Jane Langer (a professor of psychology at Harvard University, having in 1981 become the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard). She was talking about some research she was doing in the late 1970s that simultaneously blew my mind and validated a lot of things that I’ve always felt were true (at least for me). So I ordered her book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, and have been reading that at night before I go to bed.
In short, Langer’s work cited in the book centers around the question, “If we could turn back the clock psychologically, could we also turn it back physically?” What she found through her experiments and research, one named Counterclockwise in particular, was incredibly interesting for me. I highly recommend reading it as it’s pretty fascinating stuff.
I’ve always rallied against any sort of set definition or “rules” for aging. Maybe it’s because I’m creative and never lacking in imagination that I just fail to align with a lot of what “society” in general has pre-determined happens on a timeline of life. As I mentioned, I think age literally is just a number but there’s more to it and that’s where the power of the mind comes in. Rather than believe there are things I should not be doing, that I always enjoyed doing, simply because I’ve taken x-number of trips around the sun, I believe I’m just as capable of doing them as I was 20 years ago. Sometimes I feel even more capable of doing the things for all the experience I’ve built up. Snowboarding is a good example (so is skateboarding).
While one may argue that there are certain things about aging that are inevitable, I argue that they may not be (this is where the book very much spoke to me). I’ve lived my whole life largely disregarding the standard rules of aging, gender, family, work/career and more. In this fifth decade of my life, I’m fully owning that and am actually really happy that I’ve always been this way. I think if I’d have forced myself into more “traditional” or “standard” things, I’d be rather unhappy and not be able to still do the things I’ve always loved because I would have been forced to “give them up”.
