Shifting Slowly

Be right there.
One second.
Yea!
No.
I’m ok.
I’m fine.
Nothing’s wrong.
It was my fault.
It wasn’t their fault.
I don’t have time.
Life’s short.
It’s ok.
I forgive you.
No sweat.
Today, I’m working out.
I’ll do it later.
Tomorrow is another day.

And on and on. We do this as a way to put it aside for now. Or to sweep it under the rug for a later time. It’s sad how very often I do this. Constantly pushing things away to deal with later. I have gotten better. Especially when it comes to the ‘I’m ok” part. For years I had been “ok”. Just going on with life like everything was ok or going to get ok and finally, I broke. I just fell and broke and I had so many pieces of me I never found again, thankfully and then I had new pieces sewed on, thankfully. Now I’m a whole person, a different person, but a much better version of myself. The version I shoved under the rug often and said I’d get to eventually.
Life is long. We have many seconds in a day and so it’s up to us to figure those seconds out. It is up to us to figure out if in this long life we’re going to waste it getting somewhere with ourselves eventually or are we going to use those seconds right now.
Life is long in means of time. Yet, we are not sure when our time will come. So what will you do with all this time? Will you waste it catching up with your life? Will you tell yourself you’re ok and fine until you finally break?
It’s in the breaking I realized I have time, but what was I prioritizing? My health or the dishes in the sink? Self-love or the errand I “need to run”. Time with my child or the DVR. A good book or scrolling Facebook? These things I was putting aside for later are not selfish things. They are the things that make the whole of you. And if you don’t do them now, you will run out of time. You will be at the end of your long life regretting things that you had control over.
You will break and shatter and make yourself believe you are too broken to ever be put back together. Our core is love. In order to grow, we need to feed it love. To feed it love means to put yourself first and to understand that everything outside of you can survive without you needing to tend to it right then and there but if you don’t tend to yourself, you will not survive. You will not make it. Love is the way out of this jungle we call life.
Every day you will have something pull you in all different directions but you are the leader of your own life. You tell it this, “listen, I’ve got to do this thing for myself. I’ve got to give myself love first. Whatever you need from me, I’d like to be fully present for. So let me be fully present for myself first and feed myself some love and get to you as soon as I’m done.”
It’s that simple. I learned that the very hard way. It took a breakdown to understand that. Use this long life to put yourself first and know that time is there to get to everything else outside of you.