It’s holiday season, which means things are moving a thousand miles an hour. Life has a tendency to speed up so quickly it’s easy to lose control. Up becomes down, bad habits creep in, everything goes crazy.
How does someone stay centered when work demands crushing hours, you have to tend to all the delicate relationships in your life, you need to stay fit, eat well and somehow find a few minutes to disconnect and just breathe?!
This post is a note to self, a reference on how I can stand a chance at staying sane and centered when caught in a whirlwind of life. Here are my gut checks:
#1 – Resentment.
If anger is the acid that burns the vessel, resentment is its festering cousin. Resentment is self destruction. It’s an imprisonment of the mind, pulling focus from the things that matter. It’s a terrible force, but it can be useful.
Resentment is a litmus test that shows me where I’m weakest. Once I identify the forces I resent, I’m able to question why they’re causing such a response. Because resentment is a physical, visceral reaction, it’s coming from a place deep in the oldest parts of the brain.
That means it’s an automatic response to something that I unconsciously find to be threatening. If I resent my co-worker, I can live with that soul-rot until it devours me, or I can stop to dig deeper. What about this situation – about this person – is threatening me to the most fundamental core of my evolution? Is it because he’s the alpha male, and to my tribe brain that’s seen as a threat? Is it because he’s triggering some unconscious childhood trauma that I didn’t realize was there?
All I know is that there’s more to the story, and it’s threatening some primal instinct. To lean into resentment is to take agency back into your life. It’s to own your emotions, and to regain control over the narrative of our lives. It’s very humbling, it’s vulnerable, but it’s profoundly powerful. When I said resentment, who was or what did you think of immediately?
#2 – Discomfort.
What conversation have I been avoiding? Sometimes after the resentment exercise, I learn that the only way to bury a hatchet is to have a hard conversation.
Recently this happened with the aforementioned co-worker. I realized that the resentment I had towards him was entirely my own doing, and that the last step in finding my freedom would require an all-out attack on my ego. The days of passive aggression towards him needed to end, and the only way I could do it would be to look him in the eye… and apologize.
It was very, very hard.
That same primal brain weaving the hateful narrative wanted nothing to do with this show of vulnerability towards its enemy. To my logical mind, that discomfort – again visceral – was the sign I needed, showing me that this was what I had to do. Even writing this I’m nervously sweating.
Once I had the conversation, it was like letting the air out of a balloon before it popped. I was free to breathe again, to have my thoughts and my free time back to myself, not to silently ruminate my resentment.
It’s an almost universal truth, that the uncomfortable things in life are the ones that are best for us. Discomfort is a great gut check for what we ought to do next.
#3 – I liked who I was.
The concept came from a comment Kevin Smith made when discussing his mindset when he risked everything to create Clerks.
He borrowed money from family, maxed out his credit, bet everything on making this movie, knowing that it probably wouldn’t pan out to anything. So why still do it?
“I liked who I was when I was making that movie.”
Making Clerks brought out the good, the creative, the bold in him. It made him someone he liked to be, and even if it failed, that feeling was still real and worth having.
When I heard that conversation, probably four years ago, I started a list: I like who I am when…
It’s a bullet point list that I revisit from time to time to see the map of who and what I am. It has basic things like, “I like who I am when I can be silly,” to more nuanced ones like, “I like who I am when I creatively collaborate with someone and operate in harmony with them.”
The opposite is true and ties back to resentment, “I don’t like who I am when…”
Often these two questions are all I need when I’m deciding everything from whether I should eat that last Twinkie, to whether I should keep my current job. It helps me plan my morning, invest in the right relationships and decide what I’m having for lunch.
Thanks for reading and have a happy and healthy new year!
By the way, I like who you are when you read my posts, and would love to hear your own gut checks and litmus tests in the comments below.
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