Me: "Want to do dinner later?!"
Best Friend: "I know you are busy today!"
Me: "I don't want the urgent to crowd out the important, and you are important to me. What time do you want to go to dinner?"
I spent some good, quality time with some of my favorite people last night. It's my favorite kind of self-care, and it's one that has been sorely lacking in the past few months.
Today, I grade 15 papers. Well, 12, actually.
But last night, something just...I don't even know. IT CLICKED.
I have been so busy that I have started to set aside the really important stuff - my friends and the things that make me actually, genuinely happy, or my health, be it physical or mental, in favor of dealing with a bunch of papers to correct, or 20 case notes, or fretting about my article that I haven't even started writing yet, or stress in my family, or my impending licensure, or any other amount of shit that is just thrown at me on a constant basis.
Sometimes, I need to just stop the train, even if it feels like it's running away. When that happens, I realize what I've done, and stuff starts to come out in the people around me that I was missing.
In the past, I have felt guilt about this, as it happens quite a bit.
Last night on the way home, I felt something different. Something drastically shifted. I said out loud, "I'm going to ask more questions. When I get a gut feeling, I'm going to pay attention to it." Because that's what happens - when I am so focused on the past or the future and I get a gut feeling about what is happening NOW, either with me or what I think might be happening with someone I care about, I ignore it! The urgent crowds out the important. My job feels urgent. Teaching feels urgent. Family stuff feels urgent. This is hard to admit, but my friends, my marriage, my health, the things I enjoy, they all get ignored a lot of the time in favor of the urgent.
Of course, making this shift consistently, particularly in my job, is going to be hard. The urgent crowds out the important all the time in my job. If I have a clinical emergency, I have to cancel other appointments to deal with it. If I have paperwork or other administrative shit to do, I can't build relationships with my amazing colleagues, and I can't build relationships with the people in the systems in which I work. In my personal life, though, I think I'll have a much easier time. I think I've reached a tipping point about this, and it's time to just push myself over the edge.
My own internal voice has shifted from beating myself up to "it's only forward from here" recently, and I'm not sure where that came from. What I can tell you is that thinking this way feels A LOT better than beating myself up. This stuff, the present, is the important part. How I'm feeling now. How the people important to me, like genuinely important, are feeling and doing now.
Huge and abrupt shifts in my thinking can be overwhelming because I never know, as an entirely future-oriented person (thank you anxiety), what the outcome will be. But, the great thing about staying present is that the outcome doesn't matter. Que sera, sera, if you will. I think it's well past time to throw some caution to the wind and just figure it out as I go along (instead of always trying to be 10 steps ahead), like every other damn human on this earth is trying to do. Who knew I wasn't a superhero or some kind of clairvoyant? Not me, apparently.
No comments:
Post a Comment