When I am on the edge of something, I often feel a sense of disconnect from everything. With the sun seeming to rise and fall on the same day, every day can feel like a continuation of the last, ‘Groundhog Day.’
Except, unlike ‘Groundhog Day’, this isn’t a movie, this is my life. My one, precious life, for which I constantly find myself asking:
What am I doing with it?
Am I wasting time?
Nearing my twenty-third year, I feel like I should be doing more with my time.
‘Every second counts’ taken to the extreme, toxic productivity, the idea that we need to be constantly ‘doing’ in order to be worthy, is a rhetoric that constantly plagues my brain…
When, by the age of 23, my mum was married with a kid, soon to have a second one, yet that ‘second one’ (me) is still living at home, still working out how to answer the question of, ‘So, what do you do?’, I constantly feel like I’m ‘behind’ in life…
Where does this belief come from?
Our belief that we should be doing more is a product of capitalism, where productivity, by definition, is:
Productivity and our need for it is therefore man-made (i.e., unnatural/not how nature intended us to live)…
We were not born to work. We were born to live. We only have to look around at nature to see what ‘living’ is (& you might be surprised by the slowness of it)…
As in our name, human BEings, we are not supposed to be constantly ‘doing’. In fact, sometimes the healthiest thing that we can do is to just…
stop.
Pause.
Acknowledging how, where everything and everyone has a path to follow in life, we are all on the right path, simply by virtue of being alive.
We are all worthy of the good that life has to offer simply (or rather, miraculously when the chances of any of us being here are just one in 400 trillion) because we are alive, full stop…
How can we get over our need to be constantly ‘doing?’
Give yourself time to experience life in the present/to be mindful of the world around you.
Instead of constantly rushing to and from places, slow down and look around.
On your commute home from work, log out of your emails, put your phone in your pocket, and just be in the present.
Being intentional about your time in nature, going for a walk where walking is the only goal, where you’re not walking to get something or to do something, you’re just going for a walk, putting one foot in front of the other and taking in your surroundings, can serve to remind us of just how beautiful the world is…
The sound of birdsong in spring, when the air smells like summer, the beauty of nature in all its simplicity:
Our right to experience life in all its beauty is unrelated to how ‘productive’ we have been.
We’re Human ‘Be’ings, Not Human ‘Do’ings.
And so, when I get the all too familiar ‘tugging’ feeling in my chest of, ‘You should be doing more’, I remind myself of this simplicity, for which nature holds all the answers, if only we pause long enough to listen, and stop long enough to see.
❤
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