After being reading Em's post the other day about the demands of Motherhood and working and life becoming a chore, I had a light bulb moment.
Em said in her post "The answer isn’t as simple as cutting back on work, the answer is complicated. It is about accepting that this is the way my life is right now and dealing with it."
Bam. That was it. That was the answer I had been looking for myself.
Life is always going to be busy, unless of course you are a millionaire lounging on the beach in Barbados but even then you could kind of be busy counting hundred dollar notes to pay your bar bill. But for the rest of us, life is just going to keep on throwing 'busy stuff' at us. Most of us need to work but how we deal with that ... well that is our choice.
We can play the old 'When' game, you know - when I have done this or that then I can relax, when the kids are bigger it will get easier, when I have more money life will be easier, when when when...
But what if when never comes? What if there is no such thing as when?
What if all we have is right here and now and we can choose wether we live this moment feeling stressed and not enjoying ourselves or our loved ones?
OR what if we accept that there will always be something to stress us out or place demands on us and we just accept that as a fact but not let it dictate how we live every single moment of our lives?
I am notorious for not doing something I want to do with friends or family because I have too much to do.
Just yesterday I said "no thanks" to grabbing a coffee with some mums from school because I had 'too much to do'. It wasn't until I got to the car that I thought "Damn it, no one would die waiting for me to return a phone call or a couple of emails. Why did I say no?".
But it was too late, my friends had already moved on to wherever they were going and I had missed the moment, just as I have missed many moments because of this mindset of mine.
I know that I can't turn my back on responsibility, but surely somethings can wait until tomorrow?
Watching my boys laugh and enjoy enjoy themselves on a spontaneous night out was all the validation I needed to let me know that living in the moment is the way to live. They aren't thinking about what we should be doing.
They ... WE were living in the moment and in that particular moment, life is pretty darn good.
Lesson learnt.
Thanks Em.
That is all.
Do you play the when game?