On Feeling Stuck
Do you ever feel like your life is moving faster than you are?
It's Wednesday but you're still stuck in Monday. It's 5pm, but you're craving breakfast. It's May, and you're ending today's date with the year before. You've run out of clean clothes. When was the last time you've eaten? Did you ever respond to that email? What time is it? Why haven't you gone to sleep yet? You're on your 4th hour of Netflix, Girl, you said you were going to read tonight. You just checked Instagram, put your damn phone down. It's already midnight, just go to sleep. Tomorrow is Tuesday and Tuesday is another day! Tomorrow will be YOUR day. You will wake up at 5am and meditate and make yourself a nice healthy breakfast, maybe a smoothie, and then you will... oh, shit, no, tomorrow isn't Tuesday is it, what day is it?
This had been my life lately. Like quicksand is keeping my body still while the weeks pass me by. If I move it will just make things worse, I must think. So instead of moving with my life, I'm just watching it continue on without me. I'm too exhausted to catch up. I let the minutes, hours, and days win the race.
It's just been one of those months for me. Between family stuff, spraining my ankle, work, and overall busyness, I cannot tell the difference between yesterday and two weeks ago .
And, since I haven't been doing much else that's productive, I started thinking. Thinking a lot about what we do when our lives turn into this, because this kind of rut seems inevitable. There are always going to be periods of our lives when things seem overwhelming, when the mountain seems too big to climb, when the lure of pants-less Netflix binges is irresistible, when we run out of clean underwear and have to wear bikini bottoms in their place, when we decide to go for a nice, leisurely stroll with the dog and come home with a sprained ankle.
But I refuse to believe that this kind of rut actually is inevitable. It's really only the threat of it that is guaranteed. Bad days, bad weeks... they happen. We will be tested all the time. But we can choose how we react. We can choose how we view everything in our lives. You can have a bad day, or you can have a "not-the-best" day. You can blame a dirty pile of laundry on being busy and having a swollen, bruised ankle, or you can just... DO LAUNDRY.
As we all know, this is much easier said than done. My "tomorrow is another day" mantra often causes more harm than good. It means living in the future, putting off all that "getting your life together" shit another day. And viewing things in terms of days instead of moments is a helpless, cop-out kind of attitude to have. It's an excuse. It's a reason to give up on a day.
The other day, I started thinking about the difference between "easy" and "happy." I think these two terms are often confused. Like, when I come home after a long day and strip off my clothes, crawl into bed, and put on The Office for the 1,000th time. "I deserve this," I think to myself as I sink into my memory-foam black hole and avoid any sort of stimulating activity for the next few hours (I know the entire TV series by heart, guys). I used to think I was rewarding myself after a long day, giving myself a chance to ~chill out~. But, to be entirely honest, doing this makes me feel like a waste of space. It doesn't actually make me happy. It's just EASY.
What makes me happy? Reading. Writing. Meditating. Yoga. Going to the coffee shop. Walking around NYC alone. Working out.
And here I am, knee-deep in a full-fledged rut, buried in quicksand. The only indication of time passing is Netflix pausing to ask me, "Are you still watching The Office?"
They say to write down a list of all the things that make you happy, and then do those things every day. I think that we get stuck in our ruts when we forget this. It's not our bad days, it's not our sprained ankles, it's us forgetting who we are. It's us choosing easy over happy. Because, really, happiness is a choice. It's not always the easiest one, but it's aways the best one.
Being stuck in a rut is thinking you're in quicksand, and then realizing that it's just regular, plain old sand.
Getting out of that rut, is making the choice to dig your way out.
It's Wednesday but you're still stuck in Monday. It's 5pm, but you're craving breakfast. It's May, and you're ending today's date with the year before. You've run out of clean clothes. When was the last time you've eaten? Did you ever respond to that email? What time is it? Why haven't you gone to sleep yet? You're on your 4th hour of Netflix, Girl, you said you were going to read tonight. You just checked Instagram, put your damn phone down. It's already midnight, just go to sleep. Tomorrow is Tuesday and Tuesday is another day! Tomorrow will be YOUR day. You will wake up at 5am and meditate and make yourself a nice healthy breakfast, maybe a smoothie, and then you will... oh, shit, no, tomorrow isn't Tuesday is it, what day is it?
This had been my life lately. Like quicksand is keeping my body still while the weeks pass me by. If I move it will just make things worse, I must think. So instead of moving with my life, I'm just watching it continue on without me. I'm too exhausted to catch up. I let the minutes, hours, and days win the race.
It's just been one of those months for me. Between family stuff, spraining my ankle, work, and overall busyness, I cannot tell the difference between yesterday and two weeks ago .
And, since I haven't been doing much else that's productive, I started thinking. Thinking a lot about what we do when our lives turn into this, because this kind of rut seems inevitable. There are always going to be periods of our lives when things seem overwhelming, when the mountain seems too big to climb, when the lure of pants-less Netflix binges is irresistible, when we run out of clean underwear and have to wear bikini bottoms in their place, when we decide to go for a nice, leisurely stroll with the dog and come home with a sprained ankle.
But I refuse to believe that this kind of rut actually is inevitable. It's really only the threat of it that is guaranteed. Bad days, bad weeks... they happen. We will be tested all the time. But we can choose how we react. We can choose how we view everything in our lives. You can have a bad day, or you can have a "not-the-best" day. You can blame a dirty pile of laundry on being busy and having a swollen, bruised ankle, or you can just... DO LAUNDRY.
As we all know, this is much easier said than done. My "tomorrow is another day" mantra often causes more harm than good. It means living in the future, putting off all that "getting your life together" shit another day. And viewing things in terms of days instead of moments is a helpless, cop-out kind of attitude to have. It's an excuse. It's a reason to give up on a day.
The other day, I started thinking about the difference between "easy" and "happy." I think these two terms are often confused. Like, when I come home after a long day and strip off my clothes, crawl into bed, and put on The Office for the 1,000th time. "I deserve this," I think to myself as I sink into my memory-foam black hole and avoid any sort of stimulating activity for the next few hours (I know the entire TV series by heart, guys). I used to think I was rewarding myself after a long day, giving myself a chance to ~chill out~. But, to be entirely honest, doing this makes me feel like a waste of space. It doesn't actually make me happy. It's just EASY.
What makes me happy? Reading. Writing. Meditating. Yoga. Going to the coffee shop. Walking around NYC alone. Working out.
And here I am, knee-deep in a full-fledged rut, buried in quicksand. The only indication of time passing is Netflix pausing to ask me, "Are you still watching The Office?"
They say to write down a list of all the things that make you happy, and then do those things every day. I think that we get stuck in our ruts when we forget this. It's not our bad days, it's not our sprained ankles, it's us forgetting who we are. It's us choosing easy over happy. Because, really, happiness is a choice. It's not always the easiest one, but it's aways the best one.
Being stuck in a rut is thinking you're in quicksand, and then realizing that it's just regular, plain old sand.
Getting out of that rut, is making the choice to dig your way out.
Comments
Post a Comment