I lived in a constant state of anxiety — I would wake up and feel it gripping my heart. My jaw was in a permanently clenched position, and I think I even slept like that. I couldn’t slow down, and I constantly felt like I was drowning. I felt alone and desperate. It was an awful time, and it wasn’t all that long ago that that feeling was a constant friend that was foreboding my freedom and ability to feel creative or pleasure.
There are unconscious societal expectations that teach us that if we want to be successful adults in this world, we need to make our lives as complicated as possible.
We become disconnected from our stillness, and we move in frenetic ways towards our busy-ness.
You don’t see people with extraordinarily complicated lives feeling free. The more intricate our lives are, the less we have access to joy, contentment, and simple day-to-day enjoyments. The more difficult our lives are, the more frenetic our minds become. We lose perspective because we forget what it’s like to be still and connect with slowing down.
We all know the feeling of going on vacation and feeling the softness of slowing down. We’re able to take in more information, process life with less agitation, and feel less triggered. We hear ourselves more clearly, our eyes soften and we feel a lightness throughout our body. We lose weight and irritability, and our minds become less fraught with negative thoughts. It’s absolute splendour and a delight to remember that feeling.
We didn’t come to this human life to be busy and spun out in our lives. We came here to calm down, to simplify, to remember how delicate the feeling of love is and how easily we forget love. How working hard to connect to that is more luxurious than chasing a future.
We came here to learn that chasing only causes stress, and stress causes disease. The gripping tension that overtakes us when we make things complicated is like a drug, we’re so intoxicated by it that finding slowness often feels foreign.
Whatever obstacles and difficulties life has thrown your way have been meant to wake you up, not disconnect you from yourself. We use distractions and chasing the ‘next’ thing to manage discontent in our bodies; we believe that a new home, renovations, the next job, success, money, the ‘best’ partner, or a glamourous social life will heal or remedy heart-ache, feelings of being unworthy and a lack of belonging.
It’s all an illusion, and it will never ever make us feel better. Your peace won’t arrive through adding more complications to your life.
By endlessly chasing, we lose the sweetness; we lose connection and all we do is run to chase acceptance.
We’re unable to discover the gifts of solitude without tempering our need to be busy. I know people who need quiet to recover from their life, who experience massive energy crashes due to the lives they’ve created for themselves and blame external reasons for their fatigue. Never evaluating how complicated they’ve made their lives, they don’t see the direct impact on their well-being.
There are times in our lives when things feel like too much, and ‘complicated; becomes part of the everyday life-mix: raising children, divorce, caring for ageing parents or ill partners, pandemics, wars, and natural disaster, However, if we learn to make life simpler in the present, when we have to navigate those times of devastation we will be more capable and able to find our way back to centre.
Look at all the things you have in your life, and write down the things that drain you, that complicate your mind and ridicule any sense of ease in your body. My mantra for the last four years has been, “Do less, have less responsibility, take on less, and be more present in my life and to those that matter deeply to my soul.”
Make it your life’s work to create fewer complications and discover how your health changes when you remember that being slow requires more strength and discipline than moving fast.
Love, Noelle