After facing the fact, that I really don’t tolerate, better said I really can’t cope with a lot of stimulus, it’s not going to be hard to make the connection to the world of LESS. But this single word has kind of been transforming my life in the last couple years – even if it only did so unconsciously at first.
I can recall a million times I thought about myself being restless, a high-achiever, a perfectionist, a person with really (!) high expectations towards herself and the outside world. Worse than that, I WAS and still am all of that if I don’t put in the work of pausing for a moment and asking myself the question: what drives the desire right now? I am someone who can hardly take it easy, slowly, consciously. I rushed through my twenties, big time. I consumed life, or life consumed me with all its happenings, learnings, news, chances, decisions to make at a galactic speed. I could not stop, I could not rest because I was so afraid it all would catch up on me and I was so sure I could not hold the feelings. I could not just BE with them, be with me, with what I am living through at the moment. I rushed. Rushed the ways I knew: I delivered, I achieved, I ticked the boxes, I behaved, I nodded, I silently agreed to all terms, which were thrown at me. No finger-pointing here to the world out there, it really was on me. I didn’t realise it earlier, it didn’t even question it earlier till I HAD TO…
It is not the fact itself that I became a mother of a wild-hearted child…But it definitely is one of the main reasons, why my high-speed train crashed the wall after a while. And thank God it did – it was high time, it was life-saving, it was revolutionary. Painful as it gets but today I say THANK YOU for the mess and for everything I could learn out of it.
Take my younger self, always wanting to deliver 1000% (I had to think about the number here… the threshold really feels that high, most of the time… :), always wanting to make things work (yes, all the things I saw, experienced, even the ones really not in my own circle… imagine the outcome :)), never admitting, that she is weak, she needs help, she can’t cope. And that‘s the pattern I held onto, even after I had a baby. With all its needs, desires, lessons to be learned. All the new tasks taking care of an endlessly-crying newborn, learning to be a family, learning to stay a couple during that time (first thing I / we failed in obviously and very sadly). Well, you have your plate. And then you put a lot more things on that plate and try to act like nothing ever happened – you can manage this, too. Just a little more control, just a little more discipline, just a little better planning.
Well, it really is, what young families MUST master because these new challenges have to be faced and should be solved together. But there is a secret to the quotation: learning what really, necessarily belongs on that fucking plate. Everyone’s plate is different, in size, in taste – it really is as unique as it gets. But Gosh, if I understood it earlier, that I can, I MUST take responsibility for mine and I must see and admit, what I can hold at one time. Life is flowing, we go through a lot of different phases. We are alone, we then maybe share life with partners, children, pets, whomever. We find back being alone again, maybe only if we get old, maybe earlier – we don’t know that NOW and it isn’t even the point.
You have to ask yourself every single day: how big is my plate, how full is it and how do I cope with the package. I thought change is and will only be possible, if I try to man up and just do more. Take more. Manage more. Adjust more. It turns out, more is really not my word. Less is. I love less. I simply love this word and what it makes with me.
Just say the word and listen to your inner reactions, how do you respond? If I think of anything like more, bigger, newer: I get anxious, I get dizzy, it gets harder to breath and be. If I let the word less or slower work on me, I rather feel calm, relaxed and at ease. I was afraid of the dynamic at first, because I thought it might as well never have an end – you can always wish for less and think about your package as still „too heavy and big“ to carry. But, the thing is, this is not what I am experiencing.
It is rather a calming clarity, which sets in if I ask myself the question: how much of this is really necessary right now in my life, in our life? Is it essential for us to keep it (let it be a feeling, a habit, a peace of clothing, a furniture…), to hold on to it, can we do that without overstretching our system again? Or is it something we are used to having, doing, accepting as given? There is no right answer to this question and even the ones given can vary over time. As does our energy, our capacity, our eco-system with its additional capacities.
I love playing with the word ‚less‘. It is freeing my mind, lets me be more mindful and also more clear about what I’d like to have in my life. It clearly is less, than I thought of and the „less“ it gets, the better I see myself through it. The better I can fold into it. The better it serves me and not the other way around.
The less my mind craves, the easier it get’s for me to „stop doing and start being“.
Cheers to LESS ❤
Find MORE through LESS 