500 Words a Week - Are you enjoying your life?
For anyone who has read the blog before, you may see that I have an interest in personal development. At times this interest has turned into a need, into a checklist that I must do each day to feel like I’m moving forward in some capacity. When I don’t do these little things, I start to feel stagnant. I feel like I’m not progressing, I worry and fret that I’m not spending my time wisely.
Yet this is the only time we have. Delaying the happiness we can experience each day until we do a predefined checklist only changes our ability to be present. To be there for the people around us. I went travelling with my wife recently for two weeks, and as described above at times I found myself stuck in my head worrying that I wasn’t doing what I felt I needed to do to keep myself developing.
Routines and systems are great, they can help us work on aspects in our life we want to improve. Yet when we start to become trapped by them, we may start to feel that it’s the routines defining how we are living our life rather than ourselves. Feeling that in order for me to enjoy my life I need to do several smaller things before allowing myself to ease off the reins.
This may stem from our constant need to feel like we are improving in some capacity, needing to feel that we are moving forward in our life to some extent. Rather than having the ability to have fun with what we are doing. We must understand that we don’t get a second shot at the life we are living. So each time we get annoyed or frustrated at ourselves for not doing something, we are only hurting ourselves. We are only ruining our ability to enjoy what’s going on around us. By default we may also be affecting others, as if we are internally questioning ourselves, that feeling is sure to be felt by those around us.
We’ve become obsessed with achievement, we forget to appreciate what we have done and where we currently are.
Trying to become a better person to me is a wonderful thing. To some extent, this is now what I’m focusing my career on, helping people when they feel a little lost or uncertain. Yet if we become so obsessed with personal development, we don’t allow ourselves the ability to enjoy what’s going on around us and be present in the moment, are we really developing as a person?
As with many things in life, there’s a balancing act. We understand that we want to make ourselves a better person, be that with respect to how we feel in ourselves or in our career. However, we shouldn’t sacrifice our ability to enjoy this one life we have, at the constant expense of trying to better ourselves.
