The More-ness of Less-ness
This has been an ongoing theme lately in my life. I look back on all the things I thought I needed to be content and it’s a curiosity that makes me wonder what I was thinking. I mean, I’ve never been the gal that needed name brands and big stuff, but I am definitely the gal that needs to fill time. I’m not good at relaxing, or at least I never used to be.
I think we all have had those moments of reprioritization in this new year of 2020 and I’m no different. I’ve watched myself go from big dreams, to a forced stillness, and now to locked, loaded, and shot off like a cannon once again as soon as the at-home stint was called off.
I find I don’t like being so busy anymore. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t want abundance and prosperity, but it does mean that I am now trying to devote time to figuring out how to achieve those things more efficiently. I have learned this just in the month of July. How, you ask? Because July was the “shot-off-like-a-cannon” month. I’m not complaining, but I am definitely evaluating.
Here is my evaluation. I am cranky, exhausted, restless, unable to sleep through the night, wound tight, and most importantly, all of the wonderful habits I started during the collective downtime have now ceased.
This has been my life x10 for the last 15 years since I became an entrepreneur. I was so excited when I dove in and nothing lit me up like figuring out how to be better and bigger. Before I knew it, it took over my whole life. The ghost of You Could Fall Off the Map At Any Moment chased me forever and a day and no matter what I did I found that my main state of being was fear. Fear of losing it all. Fear of getting behind everyone else. Fear of failure.
I look back and I see that when I was the height of success I didn’t even notice it. When I was at the height of my success was when I was also at the height of my anxiety. I was so busy running from the ghost, I not only didn’t get to enjoy my success, even worse I wasn’t even grateful for it. How sad is that?
It wasn’t even that I wanted a bigger house, a fancier car, or whatever the latest blingy thing was at the time. It was that I was on the entrepreneurial hamster wheel of “DON’T STOP NOW OR YOU’LL CEASE TO EXIST”.
Then I realized something that far outweighed success and fear. Time. Not even just “time”, but slow time. Slow time used to be so uncomfortable for me. It was like a detention sentence handed down for doing something bad.
I don’t know a lot but I do know this: the value of “less” has superseded “more” in ways I never expected. The more-ness of less-ness has now been tattoed on my brain and I’m thrilled to see how I can start implementing this train of thought more into my life.
“The more I understand the “more-ness” of “less-ness”, the less I spend time wanting more, which in turn makes me enjoy the less I have even more.”
— e.c.
