I took a break from full time work for a while this year. The timing for this ended up being good. Last year was a year I spent working for a company that knew it was going to be acquired. The HR team at the company did a superb job of helping us to deal with the impending change, running courses on topics from drafting your CV to using LinkedIn to dealing with change. At the same time (though unrelated to the takeover), I participated in some executive coaching over about a 9-month period.
Suffice to say, I spent a lot of time thinking about next moves and what it was that I was still missing from the life I want to leave this place having lived. By October last year, I felt the coaching was going really well so, never satisfied, I decided to capitalise on this personal growth and take it a little further by FINALLY working through Julia Cameron´s The Artists Way.
I have always dabbled in art but never really done anything with it: “I´m too busy”, “One day…”, “I don´t have the patience,” were the kind of excuses I was very good at making. But an old friend expressed to me last year that she´d always wished I had done a little more with that aspect of my life than I had. And so I committed to doing the course. It was good. It was interesting. It helped me to think about why I wanted to be an artist. And why I wasn’t. But, most importantly, it made me figure all of these things out in a journal. Every day. Three pages. Around 30 minutes.
And so, while going through these very large changes on the work front, a small but, in hindsight, seismic shift was happening on the personal front by the adoption of this single daily practice of journalling.
I have never been one to sustain things for very long. I am endlessly curious, the proverbial rolling stone when it comes to new things, always in motion. But suddenly I looked up, a few months after I had left my job, and there was a body of work. Of words, put down daily. Filling more than one book. Somehow, each day from October, through November, the end of year seasonal cheer, holidays, two 50th birthdays, my own beginning of year birthday, I managed to fit it in every single day.
I am now entering Week 51 so it is almost a year. And in that year, I have gained confidence in my own ability to do something sustainably, and become rather good at it. And it has given me the courage to add to the list of daily habits. Since the beginning of the year, by adding little things into my day, I have:
- Counted calories for 267 days (and dropped 15kgs as a result)
- Meditated daily for 249 consecutive days
- Drawn and posted a sketch to Instagram every day for 214 days
- Completed a daily set of exercises for 14 weeks
- Completed daily language training in German and Italian for 51 days having broken a 49 day stint prior to that (kicked myself but got right back on the horse the next day)
- Posted here daily for 13 days
I have been back to a full time workload for a few weeks now and, by keeping the bar of achievement low, I have sustained these practices. There are days my sketching takes me 90 minutes and days it takes 9. The challenge, I have now learned, is to do something, however little, every day. It is easy to resist 90 minutes. I have a tougher time convincing myself that I can´t find nine. And, recently, to ensure I do have a spare few minutes to tick things off my list, I have taken social media distractions off my phone. As I have gone through this year, I marvel at how simple I have made it and wonder why it has taken me so long to really apply daily practice to my life. As a productivity junkie all my life, I have read the theory. And I now realise I have over-complicated things as a result. There isn´t actually a “best system” that is going to give me more hours. My hours are the same as every one else´s. But I was wasting them looking for advice on how best to utilise them.
I had time this year to ask myself what I would regret on my death bed. And every single thing on my list was a skill developed over time. Nothing was a quick fix, bucket-list item. Things that money could buy did not feature. The only things on my list were items that needed time. Having lost my father unexpectedly this year, I am more careful with what I do with my time now. It is, like time with my father, irreplaceable. I have found I now understand better that the life we leave is the one that is made up by how we spent the minutes. I am hoping to be spared long enough to make the most of this newfound realisation.