Exiting The Pause With Intent

So here we are - almost the end of May, attempting to navigate our collective and personal “new normals” as restrictions begin to be lifted. Some people can’t wait to get going again, some people are very anxious about getting going again, and I’m sure lots of us are a combination of both. No matter where you are on this spectrum, the world is moving forward from our time of Pause.

The gift of this moment in history and in our lives, is that we can make some choices about how we’d like to move forward. As a global community, as local communities, as organizations, and as individual people. I’ve been focusing lately on working with what I can control (which isn’t much really - it’s basically my own thoughts and my own actions, and sometimes not even those as much as I’d like!), so I’m going to stick to the very personal levels of choices. Collectively, of course these have huge impact in one direction or another, and here’s where we each become very powerful.

For many of us, the past couple of months have been an exercise in crossing things off the calendar; cancelling or rescheduling almost every plan we had for weeks and even months. In many ways, our lives are a bit of a clean slate for a brief moment. Before that calendar fills back up, before you’ve scheduled yourself back to whatever your pre-pandemic level of busy-ness was, I invite you to take a deep breath… give it a bit of consideration.. and then move forward with Intent.

The analogy I’m about to share isn’t a unique one - you may have heard it before - but it’s a powerful one. Imagine that your Life, the amount of Time and Energy you have to dedicate to various people and activities, is represented by an empty jar. Imagine the Really Important Life Stuff is represented by rocks, Fairly Important Life Stuff by smaller stones, and Somewhat Important Life Stuff by sand:

Now imagine the order you begin to fill your jar up with as we leave this Pause… if you place the larger rocks - the most important things in your life - in first (1), then follow with the smaller stones (2), there will be room to fit the smaller stones around the rocks. Then you top it off with sand (3) - the less important things in your life - and there’s room for that too.

If, on the other hand, you don’t pay attention to what’s getting added back in, or in which order you’re adding it, you might end up filling your whole jar with sand. Once that happens, it’s very tricky to try to squeeze in larger rocks or even smaller stones.

So. The big question now is “What’s the Really Important Life Stuff??”. I can’t answer that for you. I’ve been working really hard at answering it for myself, and have found that a combination of journaling, yoga, meditation, and creative playfulness has been allowing some exciting answers to bubble up. I “sent” myself on a 3-day at-home retreat to do all of these things, and found it incredibly helpful. As someone commented to me, it was like clearing the cache for my mind. It allowed me to reconnect with what I truly value in life, and consider ways in which those values can be a bigger part of my life, business, and art career moving forward.

Two ideas that came out of that weekend have already been put in motion: the “Slice of Serenity” series of live self-care videos that I posted (which you can find here.), and I’ve also created a virtual group retreat for others who are interested. I have now done this with two different groups of women very successfully; many of the people I know are self-employed and/or artists, so those have been my fellow participants so far. I’m currently working on a plan to offer this to a broader audience (stay tuned!!), but in the meantime I’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in participating in an upcoming virtual retreat focused on Finding Intent.

We can absolutely change our lives moving forward, with just a bit of Intent.