I grew up in a family that loved decorating for Christmas. I looked forward to it every year, and I have many fond childhood memories of hanging ornaments on the tree, stockings by the fire, and the house bathed in twinkling lights.
As an adult, I have rarely decorated for the holidays. However, I felt particularly festive this past Christmas, so I hung a small evergreen bough over my mantle. The bough came trimmed with a few glittering pinecones and some lovely silver berries. I decided to add a small strand of battery-powered LED lights, which I carefully wove through the fir branches.
The twinkling lights brought a feeling of warmth to the room. It felt so cosy to sit next to them with a cup of tea and a book during the dark and cold winter nights. I enjoyed them so much that I decided to leave them up indefinitely after the holidays.
Recently, I noticed the lights were getting dimmer with each passing day. Looking at the barely visible bulbs last night, I found myself thinking, “What a disappointment! Those bulbs have only lasted a month. What an effort it’s going to be to replace them!”
And then, with a heavy sigh, I got up to turn off the battery pack that powered the lights.
Maybe WE need recharging
Walking across the room, I quickly realised the error of my thinking, and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. But the following morning, as I was replacing the batteries, I wondered, “How often do we jump to the conclusion that something is broken because it doesn’t work as expected?” When I noticed the lights growing dim, I immediately thought the bulbs needed replacing. I didn’t stop to consider the batteries that powered them.
When things aren’t going the way we’d like, how often do we assume that our bodies are “broken” or that something in our life needs “fixing”? We quickly identify the problem and then immediately get busy doing a dozen different things to solve it. Maybe we try a new diet or do more exercise. Perhaps we sign up for an online course or buy a new self-help book. We try this device or that pill. But nothing seems to work, and at the end of it all, we’re just as tired, just as run-down, and just as unhappy.
How often do we consider that maybe it’s just our batteries that need recharging?
How often do we simply just stop?
The rhythm of it all
All of nature is flowing in continuous and graceful cycles. The passing of the seasons each year to the waxing and waning of the moon each month, the sun rising and setting each day, and the tides that ebb and flow across the hours—everything has a rhythm.
If you look inside, you’ll notice more of the same. Our bodies mirror the passing seasons by waking and sleeping each day. Our trillions of cells carefully orchestrate their work in time with the sun and the moon. Our breath flows in and out of our lungs like tides along the shore.
There’s a rhythm to it all. From doing to being and back again.
Human DOing
Somewhere along the way, we lost our rhythm and we got stuck in the doing of life.
We started to see ourselves as being only as good as our last project, the number of qualifications we held, or the groups we joined. So we started working longer hours. Then we got a side hustle. Some of us signed up for a night course… joined a weekend sports team…formed a community group.
We became slaves to our cell phones and inboxes because if people were contacting us, it meant they were thinking about us. We mattered.
We made a to-do list a mile long. Then we added more to it because we believed that doing things for others showed how valuable we were.
Our worth got tangled up in our “doing”. We started to believe that if we stopped doing—if we stopped producing—then we stopped having worth.
We forgot that we are human BEings, not human DOings.
What if…
What if you sent one less email, answered one less phone call, or did one less thing on your to-do list? Would you be any less “YOU”?
What if you spent that time enjoying one more sunset, one more coffee with an old friend, or one more hug with someone you love? What if you listened to one more song, read one more page, or danced one more time around the kitchen? What if you used that time to reflect on how far you’ve come, to appreciate how much you’ve grown, and to feel gratitude for those that helped along the way?
How would your life be different? How much more love would fill your heart? How much more joy would fill your days? How much lighter would your life become?
You are a human BEing
When your days are spent caught up in doing, in the creation of your life experience on the outside, you lose touch with your deeper sense of being on the inside, the YOU behind the You behind the you. YOU, that has always been there. YOU, who knows that there is nothing you need to do outside to prove your worth inside.
The intrinsic rhythms of the days, weeks, and years are a gentle reminder to take time to rest, to recharge your batteries. Do the things that nourish your soul and make you feel full-up on the inside. Above all, they remind us to make time for being.
When you make time for being, you step into the fullness of YOU, and from this perspective, it becomes clear that there is YOU, and there is your life experience. As a result, you begin to notice that through every experience—of love and loss, victory and defeat, joy and suffering—YOU have always remained. Not only are YOU the infinite creative possibility that’s driving the whole thing, but through every experience, YOU have also been growing and expanding in knowledge and feeling, complexity and depth.
And then you realise, it’s never been about proving anything – it’s always been about experiencing everything.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
