This morning, beautiful sunshine and I wake up early, the kids still asleep. Even as I finish my exercising, I come back into a quiet house and the only sound comes from birds singing and a ticking clock…
I can feel how my body relaxes in this silence and struck by the intensity of the experience, I think back to a conversation with a colleague. She said “looking back, I don’t know how I did it. I guess I was just making sure I survive…”. The my visceral reaction to the silence this morning was a beautiful reminder of that.
I had a mini-version of surviving in the past months (and a few maxi-versions in my life earlier on). I tried to live and work in the middle of a construction site inside and around our house that interrupted my work, that left little silence to concentrate and was rich of disturbances of any kind. Once the noise had ebbed, the holes were filled, the dust had settled, I did what I always do – and I guess most of us: work extra-hard to catch up with “lost” time, go back to normal.
And just this morning I thought: how about getting curious how I survived? How about taking time to acknowledge I had a rough moment? How about taking time to recover before I press on?
And so here I am, taking my own medicine. With my clients, I often work on topics that involve trusting themselves and taking care of themselves. Over and over I see the power of just acknowledging: “it’s a lot that I do, and it’s Ok to feel tired”. That releases a lot of the weight of self-judgment, of the thinking that whatever I do, it’s never enough.
Even if there is little or no time to rest, taking a moment to notice what I went through and which capability supported me can recharge me quite a bit. In my mini-survival that was: I can be creative in finding places to work, I can delegate and set boundaries, I can overlook dirt and chaos, I’m OK without warm water for a few days in a row.
Today, I feel less guilty enjoying a work-free moment, enjoying that my kids sleep in (they are on vacation) and I do not get any request from them (yet). And I take my recovery more seriously.
How about you? What was a had moment you went though? How did you acknowledge it?
I’d love to hear from you!