Contemplating Life’s Choices

In case anyone is seeing this as their first post here, welcome to 52 Weeks of Contemplation. You can go back through the older posts and see what else we’ve been pondering this year. Don’t feel like you have to though. For me, it’s about having a practice where I reflect, question, and contemplate things. This helps me process my thoughts, better understand the world around me, and helps me to not get stuck in “but it’s always been this way” types of thinking. If you’re new to this type of practice welcome and I hope you’ll join me through this year.

If you’ve been following along let’s get right to our first question of February!

Last week we thought about what we want more of and sometimes that’s an easy question and sometimes it’s not. If you struggled with what you want more of this question may be easier because at some points in our lives sometimes we want less of things more than we want to add things on.

For me when I thought about this question there’s a couple of things I want less of this year.

Feeling guilty – I don’t know that most people walk around feeling really great about all aspects of their lives. Sure, our lives won’t always be in some balanced harmony that feels like perfection but for too long I fell into the traps of mom guilt (oh you work so you don’t do enough for your kids) or work guilt (oh but you’re a mom so you can’t possibly do a good job at work) amongst other types of guilt. This year I want less guilt in my life and more joy in the things I am doing. Sure I won’t be perfect in everything all the time but I can sure let go of feeling like I have to in the first place.

People pleasing – It’s one of the reasons I started this blog. I didn’t want to have to write anything I didn’t want to write. I didn’t want to be constrained to being “professional” and aligned with what is “acceptable” for my job. I wanted to be able to write about all the things I like not just the ones that belong on a “professional” site or social media platform. I’m getting better about doing less of this but sometimes old habits are hard to break.

When I first started reflecting on each year the list of things I wanted more and less of were pretty big. It felt like everything was a giant endeavor to fix. As the years have gone by I’ve started to feel like it’s more refining and uncovering who I really am compared to feeling like I have to substantially change myself. This does not mean I feel I’m perfect in any way but it feels like I’m more aligned to my true self and that’s really nice.

What do you want less of this year? Less stress, less guilt, less TV time, less FOMO, or maybe less of something else. Taking some time to figure out the things you want more and less of can help guide you through the year so you make decisions about how you’ll spend your time in alignment to what you truly want for yourself.