There’s always something

This morning I had to sort out an issue with my credit card. No big deal, easily resolved in the end, but it did take up an hour of my morning I hadn’t planned to spend on that. Earlier in the week, there was a child that had to be collected from school early, there were problems with the Wi-Fi that took ages to sort out and still probably aren’t fully, there were two extra trips to the shops for stuff I didn’t realise I had to get, a spillage that had to be cleaned up, a doctor’s appointment that had to be made, an issue with my email setup, a problem with invoicing.

There’s always something.

Something that gets in the way of the other things. Something that gets in the way of what you had planned to do, wanted to do, thought you would have got done by now. It’s frustrating, it can be demotivating, it can drain us of energy. We feel like we’re constantly having hurdles thrown across our path just when we are about to make progress.

But maybe that is telling us something? What if we viewed what we are doing, viewed life, more like the hurdles race it actually is? Would we be complaining about the obstacles then? Or would we take them in our stride, trying to find a way to get over them safely, and faster and more accurately each time? We definitely wouldn’t say, “well, if it wasn’t for all those hurdles in my way, I would have finished on a much better time.”

Life is messy, unpredictable, takes you by surprise, throws things at you out of left field. Life just IS. But the good thing is that it doesn’t just do that with the difficult stuff, or the bad stuff, or the mundane stuff. It also does it with the joyful moments, the opportunities that you didn’t seen coming, the chance meeting that led to something wonderful.

That is the magic of life. So it isn’t really a case of things getting in the way of other things. There just IS. And so make sure that when those annoying things happen that you would rather not have had to spend your time on that you don’t wish them away. You don’t have to enjoy them. You can be glad when they are sorted out. But you have to treat them with respect. They are part of life. And give them the time and space that they need.

In one of my recent webinars we talked about work and how we so often have perceptions about things in work that we shouldn’t really be doing. That don’t really count as “real work”, that get in the way of it. Whether that’s because we actually enjoy doing them (which is not unusual – read more about that here), or because we don’t, because they feel like a chore (admin work, anyone?), or just an inconvenience, or not significant enough – whatever it is. But those things are work, too. So the next time you spend Sunday evening going through your emails so you can start work on Monday “prepared” or “caught up”, you might want to rethink that a little. Perhaps checking emails IS part of your work and something that you shouldn’t feel bad about spending time on in your working hours.

It’s only when we embrace life and work and everything else for what it is, that we can truly move forward. It doesn’t mean that you can’t make improvements to how things are done. It doesn’t mean that if you really don’t enjoy doing something you should find ways around it (in fact, I highly recommend this). It just means that you might feel less resentful, more appreciative, more grateful, more open to also receiving the good things in life. And who wouldn’t want that?

The tile in the picture is custom-made by the amazing Irish ceramicist, Sarah McKenna. Check out her work on https://www.sarahmckenna.ie. I have a good few of her pieces and I treasure them all.