This summer, my best friend, Stephanie Morrill, and I are reading Designing Your Life together. Given that it’s a very-much-bestselling book, you may have heard of it already. If not, it’s basically using design techniques (reframing, iteration, etc) to design a life that builds you joy, whatever season you’re in. All about intentionality, looking at things in new ways, and asking yourself the right questions. It also involves a lot of self-awareness, which is something my hubby and I think and talk about a lot.
Stephanie and I will be, in general, reading a chapter or section every week and doing the exercises, then talking about it during our Friday checkins. Of course, our Junes are a bit crazy, so we had our first chat at the end of May and then will have to take 3 weeks off while we’re both traveling, LOL.
I imagine as the summer progresses, I’ll have lots more thoughts and will likely share here what we’re working through. Today, I want to talk about just one thing that the authors bring up in the introduction.
Gravity.
They use this term to refer to things in life that we can’t change–things we can’t fight against. Things that might get us down (ha! punny…) but which we can do nothing about. And because we can do nothing about them, they do not, therefore, rate as “problems” in the design way of thinking, because they can’t be solved.
Gravity isn’t going anywhere. And neither are quite a few other things in life.
As I began the first activities in the book, filling out the gauges on a “dashboard” for different parts of life, this notion of “gravity” was immediately useful. See, one of the dashboard categories is “health.” In general, health is something we can change.
We can work out more.
We can eat better.
We can adjust our sleep patterns.
We can take (or stop taking) medications.
We can do stretches.
We can drink more water.
We can cut out caffeine or sugar or fill-in-the-blank.
And so on.
But for me right now, that will only get me so far. Part of my health is gravity. I’m in a year-long chemo regimen, and the leading side effect is “tiredness.” I’m feeling that, guys. At first, I was just super tired for the first couple days after an infusion. Then it was the first week. Then the first two weeks. At this point, the tired never exactly goes away, though it isn’t as intense.
And with tiredness comes a lot of other things. I don’t have the energy to do much by way of exercising…or cooking. Sleep doesn’t actually help.
Right now, my health is a gravity issue. Which means that instead of fussing over it or getting hung up on it, I accept it and work on other problems that can actually have solutions. I focus on what to do with the energy I have, how best to make use of my time and resources.
It’s a great way to think about all sorts of things in life though, isn’t it? There are things we can change–and there are things we can’t. How often do we waste energy–and certainly emotional and mental space–on the things that just are?
What are your “gravity” issues in life right now?
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads, she now spends her time writing fiction, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years, as well as a fantasy series and contemporary mysteries and romances. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.