Fight the Temptation
An empty calendar stared back at me. The echo of an incredibly productive, albeit stressful, year was still loud enough to hear, but the anxiety of “what now?” seemed louder than ever. I could feel my old self start to pipe up. The old version of myself who connected my productivity with my worth as a human. “If I’m not doing, what am I good for?”
I can’t even start this sentence with “in today’s fast-paced culture” because in my more than two decades worth of adulthood one thing has remained true, things never slow down. The mindset of “when things calm down” is a fallacy, because things just don’t. Life continues at a pace that sometimes we can only put our head down and seek to survive. It seems things have been stuck in fast-forward for as long as any of us can remember.
That is, until YOU, dear reader, make the conscious decision to pump your own brakes. The challenge is always to recognize how much we are contributing to our own burnout.
If you don’t actively fight against a temptation to constantly busy yourself and question if you feel less than when you’re not always doing, you will find yourself caught in the whirlwind of hectic with no chance of getting off the hamster wheel any time soon. You absolutely will find yourself in a place where you chronically say yes, even when your guts are screaming at you not to commit to one more thing.
It’s a bit like when someone is rude to you. It takes a different level of self-awareness not to let that impact your own mood and take their rudeness personally. If our spouse greets us with a sour attitude after a busy day and then begins to raise their voice when we ask them about it, it takes no time at all before we’re biting right back with the same energy.
As they say, “energy begets energy” and I feel strongly we have a responsibility to determine how, where, and when we’re expending our own very precious time and energy.
Wrestle with this, lest you lose autonomy over your own life. At the end of the day, you get to decide. That’s not to say things won’t take more from us than we want to give or perhaps they are worthy enough that we’re willing to dip deep into the reserves for a season or two. But ultimately, if we’re unhappy, joyless, and unfulfilled, I wonder if maybe we’re continuing to chase the high that comes as a side effect of busyness.
You aren’t worthy simply because of what you do for others. You’re worthy simply because you exist. Your identity is not what you do. Your identity is all those things people will really miss when you’re gone from this world.