And perhaps the one thing
that you have spent your
life working around is the
one thing you are meant to
work through instead.
The above is a quote from Chloe Wade’s Heart Talk which has many, many gems but this one stopped me on my tracks as I was listening. As I get older, one of the things I’ve been making peace with is that I am unlikely to change a drastic amount at this point. And maybe even more than that, that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with me. Like most people, I have my flaws and I have my advantages. I still work on myself a lot and try to be the best version of me as often as I can. But I’ve shifted my perspective to focus more on who I already am and working with myself instead of always judging myself or trying to be something I am not.
But one of the side effects of this kind of thinking is that I work around things more often now. As I opened my book and read these lines, I thought to myself, should I be working through things more? Is my new way of thinking getting in the way of progress in some areas? And I guess here’s what I’ve concluded.
I still do have things I want to work through but some of them will come naturally and others will be forced upon me by circumstance. And there will still be things I work around, or maybe around is the wrong word here, these will be things I own and just work with them. Instead of judging myself, I will just acept them and own them, like how I like to get to the airport hours early. This is who I am and I am okay with that.
But then this quote made me think that maybe there are also things that I just drop. Things that I don’t work through or around but I just release them. I don’t have to hold on to this stress anymore. I don’t have to worry about them and maybe I don’t have a lot of working “through” but it’s things I can just let go. I spend so much time worrying and judging and beating myself up. I overworry about details that don’t end up mattering at all in the end. And maybe part of growing up, growing older is also just letting some things completely go. So that’s what’s on my mind this week.
My plan is to pay attention in the next few weeks to which things I am working around. Where I feel like i am spinning longer than necessary, etc. And then to give myself a moment to think whether they can be dropped. My hope is that at least some of them can.
On My Mind is a year-long project for 2018. You can read more about my projects for 2018 here.
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