As I sit here in my office in Victoria we are once again restricted from going about our day to day lives, meeting up with friends, attending or hosting events or even being out excercising for more than 2 hours a day. If you live in Melbourne we’ve been here before. And you’d think we would be ‘used to it’ by now. Last year it was 118 days of this. And this time it was meant to be one week, now it is two and probably more.
So…it’s fair to say people aren’t doing as well now as they have been. I’ve had friends on the phone and some clients who are frustrated and annoyed at the restrictions. Some people are really struggling and reaching out to mental health practitioners for help. And sometimes my zen has disappeared too…and any suggestions seem so 'last year’!
Almost everyone has done all those little jobs they’d been putting off.
And to be honest…I’m kind of over it too. I want to travel. I want to be able to go out for dinner. I want to explore. I want to make new friends. I want to be able to run workshops. And I want to be able to buy a gift after browsing the shops for hours rather than scrolling online to find the perfect thing…only to discover it is coming from overseas and won’t get here in time. I know…developed world problems right?
The truth is though that this time might be just what we need to do some inner work. Often we are so busy running to distract ourselves, the whole time with this nagging feeling that there is more to life than the constant treadmill of eat, sleep, earn, spend, repeat. Too often we don’t feel happy and we don’t know why.
On the other hand if you believe that this may be a beautiful opportunity to slow down a bit…then you might just find that now you have the time to journal, to reflect, to dig deep into those things you’ve been running from in our busy modern world.
This might be the time when you can explore the work of Byron Katie, Brene Brown, Mel Robbins or Gabor Mate. These people are often held up as gurus…but the truth is they are normal people like you and me…and therefore perfectly imperfect. What is true though is that all of them have done enough work on themselves to now be able to share it with others while continuing to do the work.
The work is never done. We always discover new things about ourselves. We will always have things crop up that remind us of a past event and we may handle it differently now because of the work be have done in the past. Or maybe the same scenario keeps coming up but we’ve never had the time or space to reflect on what it is or how to change it. Now might be the perfect time to finally have a look at everything you have overcome in the past and give yourself the credit for the work you have done and see what you can work on now.
It’s the work we do on ourselves that will make us the happiest. It’s not the 9-5 out there that will make you happy. It’s the inner work, the sense of peace with the past and the hope for things to be better in the future that make life a beautiful and wonderful thing.
