This morning I woke up.
Sun was spilling through my open window and I could here the birds loud and clear. I quickly realized that my plans to wake up at 5am and get crack’n were already foiled. I immediately started to feel frustrated and overwhelmed as I remembered all that I wanted to accomplish today.
“I’m already behind,” I thought.
(I’ve started training myself to follow that thought with: “Behind what?”)
I had an epiphany in the next moment:
“The miracle is already in full swing.”
I woke up this morning! I’m alive!
The miracle is already happening and I’m right on time for it. Everything that comes next is bonus.
I’ve set this agenda to post 1 blog per week for the year. Most weeks this is a joy. This week it has felt like a chore. I deliberated with myself if I’d let this one slide… I can justify why “I’m behind on my writing schedule.” But I had to ask myself, again, why I’m doing this…
I want to develop the routine of writing and publishing… on a cadence. I want to teach myself to consistently show up for what’s important to me–to learn to prioritize something I’ve never prioritized before–writing and publishing.
The truth is… Nobody is eagerly waiting on this blog post to drop each week. There’s not a deadline and I’m not going to get fired for failure to deliver. I don’t even have money on the line. But I set this intention–I made a commitment that came from a place of true soul alignment and I’m not gonna let myself down either.
As a driven, type A personality, I dance this fine line between the expectations I’ve set for myself and the reality of whether that is fair to my nervous system. I’ve learned the hard way what happens when I push too hard—I’ve burned out before and I’m done driving through life on fumes.
The value of this process of weekly writing and posting creates a baseline that allows me to identify the things that make it harder to execute. Growing my awareness of what it takes to protect this creative time is a function of the routine I’m rooting into. Each seeming misstep is just another data point.
So today I decided to abandon the post I had in mind (ironically titled: The Power of the Present) and just share what’s real: My experience with making a commitment to myself, to my creativity, to my voice, to my authenticity.
This post isn’t about insight or healing.
It’s just my quiet stand.
A promise kept.
Being a human doing exhausts me most days. It’s a beautiful spring day and if I lighten up and take my foot off the gas pedal, I just might hear the birds. The birds that neither toil nor reap, and yet they find their daily supply of food. Right now they are feeding their young in nests tucked in hidden pockets throughout my back yard. They seem to know something I don’t about living the miracle.
Is there something you’ve set out to do that now feels more like pressure than passion?
How can you shift from doing to being?
Can you hear the birds?
