I've Been Doing it Backwards

On shucking the good little worker narrative and breathing life into something different.

Jet-lagged and chugging water, Street art in Porto (relating it to the theme: don't close your eyes to your day!), three generations playing speed scrabble (word creation, day creation)

You know that Annie Dillard quote, right? “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.” I’ve been DEEP in the inquiry of how to live for a long time. It is not tidy for me. It’s a daily affronting practice, like a green frog stuck to my face. When I pause from producing anything (work, groceries, piles of laundry), even for 5 minutes, my first thought has not historically been “Oh how nice.” Even though I know better, it’s been: “Oh no: can I, should I pause?” followed by a mental listing of all that needs to happen after the pause.

Let’s take a pause with that. You too? Or maybe not.

Meanwhile… I’ve been zig-zagging through Portugal with my whole family. Long meals. Long walks. Conversations with locals about enjoyment. “Enjoy more,” they say with words and actions. They aren’t on vacation. They are living and working and yet enjoying, at least based on what a number have reported to me, the foreigner visiting (nuance and complexity noted there). In the rural cork forest, one Portuguese man told me, “The only thing people care about in this part is family.” In cities, people here rush around too, but the tenor, baseline, and harmonic of their ‘fast’ feels different to my body. Maybe I’m wrong? But it reminds me of living in Spain as a child and then moving to the U.S. where I noticed—even in the late 80s—the shift in my life from ease to bubbling, tumbling, going, going, going, do more, more, more. Communal values around you, even if you don’t consent to them, set a deep tissue tone.

This “optimizing the day” way of being is/was (it’s changing) so normalized in me that I didn’t notice it until I began really paying attention to my sensations and thought patterns. Part of it is mine: first-born daughter, straight-A diligent student, mother + entrepreneur combo, the inbuilt responsibilities of the middle-aged human. Part of it is the fast sparkling water of modernity in a very-production oriented country. We can talk and intellectualize about “the productivity myth” all day long, but 1) do we know how it operates in our particular tissues and 2) do we know how to coax it out and transmute it into something more life-giving?

The time is now.

Can you smell the opportunity of a new way in the wind? We are living in a time of massive change and possibility. Everything is up for renegotiation. Including your day.

How To Re-Map your Day

In this week’s podcast, I share my process of radically transforming my day. We explore… the truth that your day’s structure is not neutral, what matters most to you, tolerating the discomfort of the new, imagining what could be (!!), why emotional resistance shows up when making space for the nourishing bits, and how worth is the center point. I straight-talk myself and you. This episode is a resuscitation opportunity for Your Day—and therefore your life.

I’ve been actively building my capacity for feeling okay (or ‘safe’) in a ‘down time.’ There has been a real “Oh, all the balls are going to drop” feeling in my nervous system every time I prioritize anything that to me feels extra, which has been anything that isn’t working or mothering or friending. Extra: cooking, lying in a hammock, exercising, movement, reading, drawing, stretching, playing, grocery shopping, art-making. Whoa. Really? That’s when I began to confront myself: No, this is not okay.

BOTTOM LINE. Many layers here. Income is a real need. Everyone everywhere has needed to work to live. Even if that work is not tied to money, it’s tied to food and safety. That’s an epigenetic truth in all of us. This “Your Day” inquiry is predicated around value set. What is high value, where do I ‘get’ my worth internally, how am I appreciated externally? We tend to place our attention on and give time to developing what people and culture values in us.

How does that land?

Reminder…

I don’t skimp or withhold on free content, but I do tuck away some special parts for those who want to be closer to this particular bone. After this paywall, you’ll find 1) my edges with the making of this week’s episode (getting real with myself), 2) three prompts for you to navigate deeper with the episode’s theme, 3) six personal photos of my life (Portugal on tap here) to share how the theme has been alive for me, 4) one free 2-hour LIVE Monthly Mammaling workshop too!