Learning to slow down and enjoy life
“Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.” – Eddie Cantor
I want to start doing something a little different on my blog. At the start of each week, I want to dedicate a post to reflecting on the most important lesson that I learned during the previous week. From there, I want to talk about how I am going to implement this lesson into my daily life, and why I think it is necessary to reflect. Let’s do this!
This week was somewhat of a challenging week for me. Yep, negativity slapped me in the face on Wednesday, and to be quite frank, it set the tone for the rest of my week. The biggest lesson that I was forced to learn through a week of many highs but a significant low, was to slow down and enjoy life more.
From the minute that I woke up on Wednesday, I could tell something was a little off. There was this imaginary cloud that seemed to be hovering over me all day. A cloud of anxiety, with a mixture of negativity and anger.
No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on something positive, I just couldn’t. My heart was racing, and my mind was spinning out of control. As the day progressed, my blood seemed to be boiling hotter and hotter by the second.
At work, I am a very competitive person. Not necessarily with others, but primarily with myself. I try to go to work every single day with the mentality of doing what it takes to be better than I was the day before. I take pride in doing more, and being a better person/employee day after day. To be completely honest, I rarely give myself room to breathe until I am pleased with the progress that I have made.
That is something that I had to embrace this week. As I have talked about before in my posts, life is all about progressing over time, not overnight. Sometimes, it is important for us to take a step backwards so that we can regain a sense of motivation to accelerate forwards.
A lot of the stress and anger that I was experiencing on Wednesday came from that unsettling thought of having to take a step backwards, or even giving my body and mind the rest that it was desperately needing. I have always been the type to push myself and pursue every idea that comes through my head, even if it is a small or spur of the moment idea.
As I was becoming more and more angry throughout the day on Wednesday, I finally decided that enough was enough, and I headed home. I realized that it made no sense for me to jeopardize taking my anger out on somebody, or to keep digging the hole that I was already digging.
Now, for those who don’t know me, I do not regret a single thing in my life simply due to the fact that regret will not get me anywhere. Sure, I can learn from my past mistakes, but I am not going to beat myself up over something that has already happened, and something that I will never be able to change. I personally believe that the only thing regret does, is takes away from the present.
With that said, I spent a lot of time learning and reflecting from my mistakes this past week. I learned that the next time I wake up feeling that way, you better believe I am taking PTO all day. I am not going to put my body through that amount of stress again just to meet a monthly quota. It did more harm than good for me to even be at work. Not only did I not want to be there, but I was angry, and it made a “sour” impact on my entire week.
I also learned that I need to slow down and embrace the little things in life. I love my job, I love my family and friends, and I love writing. But it is the little things in life that make mine so great. Recently, I have been so focused on pushing myself without stopping, that I haven’t been doing a good job of recognizing the little things in life.
So one thing that I want to focus on this week, is taking a little more time for myself. Maybe it is by meditating for ten minutes a day, maybe it is reading for thirty minutes before I go to work, or maybe it is even eating dinner in silence and just reflecting on my day. All I know is that I want to focus on being more present in life, and I want to enjoy every minute of the amazing life that I have been so blessed to have.
Here is to a new week.
Michael Bonnell
10/29/2018
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