I have struggled for the past year with the idea of letting go of beloved rituals and habits. Because writing is what I do for a living, I knew I had to create a structure for my life so I wouldn’t succumb to cleaning the house or watching Oprah instead of heading to my home office to do my work. Every morning I made coffee, spent quiet time reading and writing in my journal. Then I would head to the desk, check emails and my calendar, then write. Break for lunch. In the afternoon, I conducted interviews or researched a new project. Break for exercise.
I was very attached to this schedule. And in fact, would get irritated at any interruptions of it. I clung to my schedule as a way of shushing the Inner Critic who reminded me constantly that I was really afraid that if I didn’t have my habits, I would do absolutely nothing. My schedule was shot to hell the second my daughter was born. At first I fought the death of my schedule, struggling in vain to continue to work at the same pace as before in exactly the same structured days. Disaster.
Lately I’ve been meditating on flexibility. I’ve experimented with writing at 4 a.m. before anyone is awake, snatching time during naps, and asking my mom to watch the baby so I can sneak a few hours in. I’ve purchased a notebook that I carry with me and have started writing in longhand again, a paragraph at a time, while I watch my daughter play at the park.
Today, stretch your body. And consider if there are any areas of your life in which you have become too rigid. How can you experiment with different ways of approaching the same old problem?
