On blessing the rains.
When you spend most of the waking hours in your day spinning in circles, it’s inevitable that you’ll start to feel a bit sick. You’ll find yourself wondering why you’re continuing to turn and turn, and turn again, endlessly engaging in a behavior that makes you feel like you might throw up a little.
For me, this spinning is a kind of a life constant. I’ve always been a bit of an overthinker, a little too sensitive, and hyper-analytical to what we can most definitely categorize as a fault. I’m always looking for an answer, or some kind of confirmation that I’m living “the right way.” Everything needs to be correct. Hence, the name of this blog.
But as we all know-and as I very much should considering all that’s happened in my life thus far-there’s no such thing as being right or prepared or having the solutions all the time.
So I decided to stop. I took a deep breath, left my laptop AT work, laid on a heating pad—because #thirty-and evaluated what it was exactly that was making me so anxious and stressed and emotional all the time. While work has been a huge part of it, I had to be honest and recognize that it wasn’t the work itself that we causing distress—it was how I’d internalized the aspects of the work that fell out of my control.
Work isn’t the only thing I do this with. I make myself dizzy fairly often, looping back and spinning around as I contemplate the ins and outs of things I either know aren’t good for me, problems I’ve already found solution to, and questioning essentially every decision I’ve made until something in the universe indicates that I made the right choice. Without knowing it, I slowly turned into this person who needs and constantly seeks validation. Even my prayers are rooted in the universe sending me signs that I am doing things right.
Today, I decided to just be okay with things being... a little bit wrong. I stopped reacting, and instead existed in this meditative state of acknowledging, and then moving forward/past the thing that once received an intense and utterly exhausting emotional response. Pressures at work suddenly became much less heavy, being spontaneous became second nature and walking out into the rain without an umbrella became... the only option. Because I don’t own one. In fact, my 20 minute walk in what was essentially a monsoon would become my favorite part of the day, besides this Uber ride where “Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing is being blasted in the Nissan of this Eastern European man.
In short, I realized how little I cared that I was getting wet.
And while I can’t guarantee that this is the approach I’ll take to every day, it certainly kept me in a better headspace than the alternative.
Here’s to making the choice to live in the moment and accepting things for what they, are as opposed to stressing about what they’re not and what they should be.
