Today is the first day that I have been down in the past few weeks, and I am really down. I am disappointed that my flight to Vegas was cancelled last night. Instead of having fun in Vegas with some great friends, I am sitting in Houston alone at PF Changs. Most of all, I am frustrated with the horrible treatment that I experienced from Southwest Airlines when they lost my baggage. I hate how helpless and unappreciated they made me feel. I hate that I spent more than eight hours at the airport yesterday and never went any where, and I still do not have my bag.
This feels like an opportunity for a self-assessment.
Every where in the world there are people starving, children dying of cancer, woman being abused….there is so much pain and tragedy in the world, and I am sitting here worried about a lost bag, and a cancelled flight. Ugh! My running shoes and favorite shirt were in that bag. Well, there are children living on the streets that do not have a home much less shoes. It is far too easy to get caught up in our Urbanized world where we forget how fortunate we are in life. My sister once told me that 99% of all women in the world would gladly trade places with me.
Did you know that a person that makes around 40,000 US dollars a year is in the 1% income bracket in the world? Life in America is filled with opportunity and comforts that people around the world only dream of. So why do we get so caught up in our “First world problems”? We can dismiss this as a symptom of being human, or we can decide to expect more from ourselves. I am choosing the latter.
I think that this choice starts with a little self-assessment. What are my priorities? Where am I focusing my energy? Where do I want to go and what do I want to achieve in my life? What am I doing to get there?
When it comes to my priorities and what I want to achieve in life, the picture is very clear for me. That makes it hard to explain why I waste energy on things that are not my top priorities. The most obvious example is online dating. I have had so many interesting life experiences that I could write about, and my mind is filled with positive thoughts and ideas about life. My heart is filled with happy memories of my boys, so why are there so many posts in my blog about dating? I do not know. I could play the “I am only human” card. Humans have a need for love and companionship, but I decided in paragraph two of this blog that I am burning my “I am only human” card. So what is the answer? Why am I wasting time and emotional energy on something that is not a priority for me?
It is notable that my readers hit the posts on dating about 10 times more frequently than all of my other posts, but I do not keep this blog to appease and audience. I keep this blog because I love to write, and I want to encourage others to not be afraid to be themselves, I want to inspire people to step out of their comfort zone and take on challenges like the MS150, and as I said in my first blog post, “I feel like life is running by me. I am creating this blog in hopes of capturing it.”
The summary of my self-assessment is that my priorities are well defined, my goals are established, and I am working hard towards what matters to me, but I am wasting time and energy on things that are not important to me. I think this waste of energy is like any bad habit. This is our default behavior, and we do it without even thinking about it. We even do it without realizing that we are doing. Ever over eat? Did you ever consciously think to yourself (shoulders swinging side to side in enthusiasm and anticipation), “Yep! Yep! Taking in a thousand more calories than I need and feeling life a fat miserable blob the rest of the day!!”
Of course not, you likely sat mindlessly in front of a plate of food where the law of diminishing returns kicked in twenty or so bites ago, but you still kept going without thinking about. I am guilty of this from both a food perspective and from a dating perspective. I have no idea why I continue to exert so much mental energy and time to dating when a relationship is not a priority, and at this point I know that I am not going to find true lasting love on the internet. Online dating is a default behavior that I use to mindlessly occupy my time, which makes little sense considering how much I value my time.
I do not want to be on default. I want to get my mind off auto-pilot. I want to govern my actions with intention and purpose. I want to be positive and appreciative of all of the blessings in my life. I have made significant strides in this, but today I let a cancelled flight to Vegas and a lost bag take me away from being the disciplined and focused person that I want to be. I want to spend my time and energy on the things that matter to me – my boys, my health, my career and my friends. For me these are the four quadrants of life, which are governed by my faith. I also want to start writing more about what is important to me and less about what is not a priority for me at this point in my life…..here goes!