Let's close our eyes.
Last night I had a beautiful conversation with a friend of mine about being busy about productivity wanting to accomplish things everything that we try to do in our daily lives for some of us who are productivity freaks like me this contemplation can be a good exploration to see something that we may have missed in the past as a culture,
You talk to anyone or at least that has been my experience a generic question like,
Hey how are you doing?
And more often than not,
The response comes out oh very busy keeping busy or being busy but somehow busy with the word that kind of controls our life you busy is not a phase it's not something that we do for a day or two and then we are free busy is an activity that requires maintenance the more you do the more busy you are the more you do the more you have to do the world of to-do lists I think it was only a matter of time when someone realized what kind of a list is this to-do list the more you scratch out the more items get appended to it the list of activities is just endless things always keep breaking apart,
Deteriorating coming up and if these lists run our life then we are always in catch-up mode we are riding this wave of to-do lists where on days we get a lot of things scratched off our list we feel good and most days we feel overwhelmed maybe sometimes not good enough stressed exhausted,
Fatigued there is nothing wrong in the to-do list and nothing wrong in getting things done and nothing,
Absolutely nothing wrong in getting more things done but what is slightly muddled up is how we approach these lists and these lists are actual lists sometimes or sometimes just action items,
Burning,
Our mental energy even as a kid when I was in engineering school there was an exam no matter how much time I had before the exam one or two days before the exam was the perfect time to study and even if I tried studying before the exam a week,
A month it didn't matter the day before the exam I always felt like I had not fully understood things that might say a lot about my engineering capabilities but one or two years in I realized that once I head over to my college and I sit in that examination hall I am prepared no matter how much was pending the day before I was ready that was the best I could do and whatever was not studied,
Skipped over,
Forgotten,
That was also a part of being ready now that I look back and can conceptualize I feel intuitively I studied what I wanted to study the intelligence,
The innate intelligence in me was running the show whatever was deemed important sometimes important and urgent got accomplished and I think the same is true about my everyday life I have a thousand things to do but the most important always get done the bills get paid on time whatever is on the calendar gets accomplished and whatever is not really in my heart to be done stays pending until it becomes important and urgent and then it becomes accomplished sounds like a straight forward system only that between it being pending and getting accomplished it burns a lot of my mental RAM,
My mental energy creates a lot of unnecessary anxiety and I see this happening in my friends and family as well but what if we recognized that the list is only a guide,
Not a rule instead of it running the show it's a tool to facilitate where we are headed unfortunately the world that we are a part of tracks what is accomplished,
How much is accomplished being busy is rewarded and incentivized announcing to our friends,
Family that oh yeah I'm busy,
Very busy,
Is a matter of pride but when we do pause and reflect for ourselves we don't measure the quality of our life in what we have accomplished we care about how we feel we care about how we felt before,
During and after our actions sometimes half done things provide us a lot more fulfillment than scratching all the items of our to-do list and we can take a moment to reflect,
To verify for ourselves in so many decades everything that was needed got accomplished and whatever is pending or remained pending was never really something that we wanted to accomplish anyways and we can also verify by how we evaluate the quality of our life how we keep a running list of tasks we accomplished in the last year,
5 years,
10 years how do we look how we felt in the last year,
Last 5 years,
Last 10 years we care about how much happier we have become how much we have grown how much we have shared contributed loved,
Laughed celebrated so this friend of mine coming back to the original story he suggested what if what if we decided intentionally,
Consciously,
Knowingly that this emotion or this attitude is what I want to experience today if you look at your list and you see that a lot of those things that are on your plate for today are inciting fear in us what if we intentionally decided and told the universe I want to feel courage,
I want to be courageous today I want to feel abundance today according to him he said there is no end to the activities what counts at the end is the inner work the growth the quality of our life things will get done as they have always been getting done the only question is how,
How are we feeling?
Is there grace,
Abundance,
Courage,
Love running through our days,
Through our lives or is it the usual overwhelm,
Anxiety,
Catch up the same activities that we do can become an opportunity to experience what we intentionally set out to experience or it could become an unintentional set of rehearsed attitudes,
Unconsciously rehearsed attitudes running our life our life is made up of days the more intentional days we have,
The more intentional life we'll have the more intentional life we'll have the more intentional life we'll have the more intentional life we'll have thank you
