Change

One of the things that strikes me whenever I get a little bit of downtime (usually, forced downtime) is this eagerness I have to get back to my "regular" life. Life as I knew it. Doing the things I love to do. Living this rich existence that I have grown to love. 

But...do I really want to do that?

I think one of the gifts of a season like this, even a short one, is the opportunity to re-evaluate some things and to make some changes if it's time to do that. I mean, why does your life have to go back to looking the way that it always did?

Some of the changes that I come out of these seasons with seem silly. They're so small and inconsequential. So small and inconsequential, in fact, that it's easy to think that they don't really matter after all. That my life would not change very much if I implemented them or if I didn't. And in that case, it can be really easy to fall back into old patterns. Habits die hard, even when they are completely arbitrary and sometimes foolish. 

For example, here's something that I'm coming out of this particular season with: I'm no longer hungry when I wake up. That seems like such a small, silly thing, right? Like, who cares? It doesn't seem that it would honestly make a difference. 

Except that I am a person who has always eaten very first thing when I get out of bed. I literally get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and make breakfast. It's the first thing I do every morning. So then, the idea that I am no longer hungry when I wake up could be a significant change in the flow of my day. 

I could go on getting up and making breakfast. I could continue to eat first thing in the morning. It's what I've done forever; my autopilot makes it easy to keep doing that. Except that now, when I force myself to eat even though I'm not hungry, I start my day with this sick feeling in my stomach. This feeling of blah that I can't quite shake. It just sits heavy inside of me, and it throws off everything I want for my day. 

Truth is, I don't know what it's like to wait a little bit to eat. If I even get hungry at that point. I know the importance of breakfast, so I'm always going to have a little something, but what if it's not the first thing I do? How will it change the way my body works throughout the day? How will it change my energy levels? What will become the new thing that I do first? The possibilities that stem from one small, silly change are numerous. 

I don't know what it might change for me. But I'm willing to find out. 

And that, I think, is the greatest gift of a season of downtime. We get to go back to our lives, but we have a little bit of this newfound freedom to choose again how we engage with them. We get to decide if that thing we always did because it was what we always did actually enhances our life or creates a barrier to it. We get to recognize where we've had some unhealthy relationships with our routine and decide that maybe now is the time to start over. We get to build depth back into a blank canvas, into completely empty spaces and layer it just the way that we want to to create the most meaning, impact, energy, love, fulfillment, whatever. 

I think that's why it's so easy for me to engage with the emptiness, with the quietness, with the waiting. I'm not idling; I'm totally offline. Because whether it's a few minutes in a waiting room, a few days of PTO, a few weeks of recovery and rehab, I want the opportunity, when I boot this system back up, to fill it the way that I want to fill it and not just default to the last system update. I want to make tweaks. I want to rework my priorities. I want to rediscover my love for the life that I haven't been able to live for however long it's been. 

I want the opportunity to change. 

Even if I don't eat breakfast first. 

Are you willing to use your empty spaces to make your life more full? Are you willing to embrace the opportunities life gives you for change? Or are you so restless that you're ready to rush back and start living by rote all over again? 

What would it do for you to make one small, silly, seemingly-inconsequential change right now? I bet your heart already has an idea of one.