Happy Sunday Everyone:
These Sunday Thoughts are a funny thing. Most of the time they help me, some of the time it feels like a total burden and I’m not sure why I started doing them. Realizing I miss at most 5 weeks a year, that’s 376 Sunday Thoughts over the past 8 years. That’s a lot stuff to share about what goes through my crazy brain.
They were a burden from Friday around 4:00PM to Saturday around 9:00AM. Why? because I didn’t know what to write about. Then it starts consuming me. I’m partially present with the people around me while the wheels are turning. I woke up yesterday morning and first thought out of brain was what am I going to write about? Followed by, “I’m just going to stop doing these”, followed by “if I stop doing these my life might change, and I like my life”….this is literally the crap that rolls through my head.
After my mental challenges with myself on Sunday Thoughts topics, I look at my phone and a co-worker had sent me an email, it finished with “enjoy the weekend and RELAX”. That’s when it hit me, I’m the world’s worst relaxer, and in part because of things like Sunday Thoughts. It’s always that something is next, it’s this guilt load of “I can’t relax, I don’t have time, I have something next”. It sucks. It’s like I have the equivalent of insomnia for sleepers but for relaxing (is there such a thing?). As I sat there yesterday morning thinking about this it dawned on me that not being able to relax is not an honor. It’s easy for me to turn into a martyr for work, the patron saint of the grind. It’s typically what leads to the family arguments of “do you know how hard my day was?”….that one never ends well. I’ve now convinced myself that not being able to relax goes into the selfish category. It deprives anyone I care about to get the best of me. When I think through what relaxed looks like, it looks like being present in the current moment and enjoying it for all I can, and not stressing about what is next, what isn’t done, what needs to be done.
As I sit here and think about how I’m going to get myself to relax more, it will be a work in progress. I mediate, I journal, I have my morning routine….and although I believe that stuff helps and works, at the end of the day, it’s a mindset that only I can help myself with. For me, I have to get the mindset right first, the “why”, and then go from there. The mindset needs to always be on the lookout for what is truly important in my life and what is not. What is trivial and what is essential. Most things are trivial in the grand scheme of things. My new definition of the word “relax” is to be present and enjoy the people and things I love in my life. That’s a good way to relax. And as it relates to Sunday Thoughts, I’m going to do them when I want to moving forward, if it’s not there, so be it, although this one was helpful for me (which only adds to the confusion). Ha.
Thomas literally just rolled up to me and said “Dad, wrap it up, let’s go to the beach”…and so the first test begins.
My hope for all of you is you’ll find sometime on this long and special weekend to relax.