The Power of Deciding What You Won’t Finish

I had been spoon fed the concept since birth. Force fed well after I was weaned from the tit and still I can feel the threat of its re-emergence on any given Wednesday. I wake up wondering if she will email telling me her plans for the weekend and how I am going to fit into them. Since I breathed my first she engrained in me the need to fill up every minute of my day. Like any good child does I picked up her habits and brought them into my adult life. I regurgitated unanalyzed information and began cramming it down my kid’s throats and into my husband’s mind, but he did what I should have. He resisted.

Something beautiful happened to me. I was given the opportunity to live with a man who values quiet Saturday mornings with coffee. Who insists on not making plans every weekend because he just wants to wake up and wing it. At first his way of life was an anathema to my limitless being. We have to be busy, doing things all the time, and making plans for what we would do next and there he is saying, “Sit down, and relax.” It took years for me to see the beauty in not making plans. In not organizing all of life. In setting limits and saying no to things. I turned from the dark side and to the light and now I fight hard to have my space and calm. I choose to just be, when I can, and not have the weekend planned by every Wednesday.

“Social media creates the illusion that there are no limits, and that’s obvious to anyone who has checked the total number of tweets sent per day (about 500 million).”

— John Brandon

Social media supports the we have to be doing concept. There are feeds of information we are missing and if we don’t get in there and check it we won’t know what is going on. Social media gives us the idea that there are no limits as to what we can accomplish, but as finite beings we must understand that we have limits. We have limited time during the day, limited resources, attention span, money, energy, you name it. We simply cannot do everything and we don’t need to. We can get off the fill up our every minute of the day treadmill by using our power to say no and when we do we will free ourselves up to say yes to accomplishing more. To doing what is…