There are the days we struggle just to keep up. There are the days we fall behind. And, then, every once in a while there’s a day when it all lands square, when the light hits bright on the spots desperate for illumination, when the confusing parts finally make sense and we are able to step forward.
Maybe even twice.
Hell, maybe we get a few of those days in a row and — POW! — we’ve got momentum. We can do it!
BUT — and it never fails, does it? — the struggle reappears, followed by the fall-behind, and the disillusionment, and the pain of feeling stuck, and so on and so on until we’re nothing but exhausted.
As the writer L.R. Knost put it: “Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again.” She goes on to talk about the space between the amazing and the awful — the “ordinary and mundane and routine” — which offers, finally, the chance to exhale and relax.
At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
But in an age of constant streaming and scrolling and continual 24-hour cycles of news, work, parenting and every other modern responsibility, that exhalation time becomes elusive and our rhythm gets, umm, what is the technical term? Oh yeah: JACKED. Your life is jacked.
The adrenaline never stops; it just goes from high tide to low tide and back again. There is no respite, no recovery.
Maybe there’s no direction, either. No purpose. No sense of real contribution or joy… just repeating the same empty motions. And merely staying afloat feels like the best you can hope for.
You know Rob Bell? (Author, teacher, primo podcaster. If you don’t, you should.) Rob talks about his approach to taking Sabbath, a day turned completely off from creating or making or doing and devoted instead to an intentional slowdown — “a day when you act like the work is done, even if it isn’t” — which can be that much-needed chance to be still long enough observe, feel and heal.
“Sabbath forces you to listen to your life,” he writes in How To Be Here. “Sabbath is a day when you are fully present to your pain, your stress, your worry, your fear. Sabbath is when you let whatever you’ve pushed down rise to the surface. Sabbath is a day when things that are broken get fixed, when things within you that have torn are mended.”
The poet Nayyirah Waheed gives it gut-punch style: “every once in a while. take off your life. and rest.”
DAMMMMMMNNNNNN.
Rest is precisely what I needed a couple of weeks ago. Took a whole Saturday unplugged. Skipped my kid’s basketball game and let Dad cheer her on solo. Ate popcorn for breakfast and ice cream for dinner. Stayed naked for the better part of the day. Netflixed. Napped — twice.
No email, no social media, no deadlines, no decisions, no deep talks, no disappointments, no discipline, no deliverables, no drama, no finances, no family squabbles, no expectations unmet.
I took off my life and rested. And didn’t feel one bit guilty about it.
Luckily, that one-day recharge was about all I needed before I was ready to get back to it, largely because the life I put back on is the one of my choosing. It’s one of intentional creation, based on understanding what works and, more critical, what doesn’t.
BUT WHAT IF TAKING OFF YOUR LIFE FOR A PERIOD OF REST ISN’T ENOUGH? WHAT IF YOUR HAPPINESS DEPENDS ON CREATING ONE THAT’S RADICALLY DIFFERENT?
WHAT IF YOU NEED LESS OF A SABBATH AND MORE OF A SHAKE-UP? A FULL ON WAKE-UP?
I have lived through spells — weeks, months, whole terrible years, even — when the life I was wearing was one that wasn’t going to fit, no matter how hard I tried to reshape myself for it. And taking it off for a period of rest wasn’t ever going to be the answer.
That’s because the life itself had to change.
If you know this feeling, and you want to pick up the conversation from here, please join me for RESOLUTION, my new online course that starts — when else?? — Jan.1. We’ll talk about the why, the what and the how of getting into the life you *want* to wear, rather than the life you just feel stuck in.
Life isn’t something to be suffered through. Full stop.
I love you.
