Women and a Culture that Lives Life on the Surface

Think about the myriad of routines you engage in throughout your week or just one day. There are so many logistics that we are responsible for as women. If you are a working mom often it feels every moment of your day is accounted for. What would have been your down time is spent planning the next three tasks to play out over the next day or so. “But I have to do those things otherwise my life and the life of my family won’t work”, you say.

And at any given moment you must know where your post is. It may be in the office, monitoring your boss’ deadlines, at home paying the bills, picking up your kids, making sure your husband makes that Doctor appointment he needs, or checking in on your parents during the week. The problem we get into is that all our activity is always tied to something concrete. Everything we work on must have visible results. If the use of our time and energy is not spent on something “tangible” we have this underlying assumption that it will fall apart.

When we live life at this pace we lose connection to meaning. Our minds are meant to function on short and long-term projects. Our minds thrive when we have an assortment of short and long-term engagement, when we don’t have to constantly be limited to deadlines. In other words, we must make room in our lives for “open time” and “down time”, time spent doing nothing, and this does not include sleeping. When we reduce our minds to constantly producing “deliverables’ we become nothing more than machines. It doesn’t matter how many perfectly scheduled life events you can produce, or how many perfect objects you can obtain for your driveway, you were meant for far greater achievement than this!

In fact, the way life works is that the harder we try to avoid a life of meaning, the more our efforts become jeopardized by our inner life. We all have been visited by “moments of truth”-death of a loved one, a divorce, a terminal diagnosis out of the blue. Often we say these things just “don’t make any sense”. But in fact, they make a lot of sense. They are reminders that you were meant for more. Deep loss shakes us out of our zombie-like routines. We have too rigidly tied our identities to the amount of activity in our lives. We are afraid to stop. To do so means a collapse. It means an admission of failure on our part as rulers of the Universe. And what should we do with ourselves, then?

Maybe we could remember what it meant to just BE? Maybe we are enough as we are. Maybe we are worth all the love in the Universe in the first place. The problem does not lie in the activities of our lives, but rather in the fact that we have not connected them to what is meaningful to our lives. We imitate our parents and our peers before we decide what is important. We know easily what all this means. We buy the vehicle that is the neighborhood standard; we hold the wedding that our circle expects to attend even though we begin our life together in debt; we throw our kid’s birthday party in the most obnoxious venue because that’s what the other parents are doing when we’d prefer a quiet family celebration; we chauffeur our kids into activities that take them away from us.

It is essential that we create spaces in our lives that connect us to meaning. If you know no other way to do this then start out by “scheduling” it in at first. Your instinct will guide you if you need to make more room. The perspective gained in this space will lower your blood pressure and help you make better long-term decisions. It allows you to say decades from now, “Oh yes I made that decision then because this was more important to me and I created something new that I can be proud of now.” Creating time for reflection is what allows us to live a life of integrity and purpose. So dig below the surface, it is far more rich and wonderful and you will have no regrets for living life deliberately!