Five years ago, I began to practice a pace of life that Matthew McConaughey calls a saunter. A slower pace and less jam-packed days feel a hundred times better than my whirling dervish of a busy life ever did. Living this way takes work, but it has been well worth the effort.
Do you make it a point to exercise your creativity? What you do doesn’t have to involve art. And it doesn’t have to result in a giftable or even Instagram-able product. It doesn’t even have to be useful. Creativity doesn't have to have a point beyond the fact that pausing to take a break from your regularly scheduled life to be creative can change the way you see and do everything.
This summer I've been distracted from both my garden and my yoga practice by the need to be present to my day to day life. It turns out that both are hardy enough to bear fruit even as I pour my attention elsewhere.
When I was a girl, I remember sitting on the bed watching my grandmother get ready. She looked at her reflection and smiled. I suspect she was the same age that I am now. I want to be like her. I want to be friends with my body even as it goes through all the crazy changes involved with aging.
Relax. It's not just you. For millennia we humans have tended to stop doing the things that are good for us once the things that are good for us have made us feel better. Here's how to embrace the long-haul over the quick fix.
Have you ever had one of those moments when your friend's simple question, "What's new?" leaves you tongue-tied because you don't want to burden them? The next time you find yourself feeling like life is too much - take a breath. Remember that most world traditions agree that the reason we’re here is to find meaning in it all. Even the really hard stuff. It might take some time, but if we keep looking, we will find it.
A blessing shared at the beginning of a yoga class - May you be filled with loving-kindness. May you be well. May you be peaceful and at ease. May you be happy. - has the power to deepen our sense of connection to the world around us, even in the most tumultuous times.
As much as we’d like to, we do not have control over the direction that our lives will take. Often, what keeps us from freely flowing where life is taking us is our instance that things should be another way. Once we accepted that this - whatever this is - is the way we’re going, we might find that getting off the “main road” offers some amazing views that we would have missed otherwise.
This essay starts with what just might be the oldest and worst "Dad Joke" and ends with a life hack. If you keep finding yourself in the same annoying situations and would rather not - read on.