Life doesn't always ask for our permission to happen. We make all the plans in the world and sometimes I think it just watches in amusement and decides to spin things around. The lesson here is that we are not always in control and we have to learn to ride the wave from whatever angle it comes.
As much as this is true, I want to talk about a few things that we do have control over and the importance of maintaining that control for the sake of our sanity. I for one don't handle stress very well and while I have had to learn to keep my stress within acceptable lanes, I have also learned that I can feed things in my life to lessen the stress.
1. Your environment. For me that is my home and who and what I allow into that space. Not everyone has the privilege of having a conducive work environment, not with the work load and conflict with colleagues that you may face but what happens in your home, that you have control over. You may spend your days putting out fires but when you go home at the end of the day, that should be the space where you have peace and security. The place where you should be able to take off the burdens of the world and just be. Your home should be your sanctuary.
2. Your relationships. There are people in your life that you have no choice but to co-exist with no matter how strained the relationship is but not everyone in your life should reflect that. You have a choice about who you allow in your life and whether to accept what they bring to the table. The older I get the more deliberate I have learned to be about who I allow in my life and the less scared I've become to burn bridges especially those that lead nowhere. I choose to give my time and efforts where they are reciprocated and to be okay with walking away from situations that are not beneficial to my peace and sanity. It's become important for me to invest of myself where I know there will be returns and I now know that the right relationships would never ask anything of me that they were not prepared to give in return.
3. Your time. Time wasted can never be regained so one has to be conscious of how they spend their time and what activities they engage in. You have to know that you can't honour every single invite for lunch especially when it means sacrificing other important things that you could be doing with your time. Important could be relative in this context because you may not understand why someone declines a lunch date to go sit at home but for me it could be important because being a working mommy who is also studying, late nights and weekends away from the house become a norm, a day off doesn't always equate to a lunch date but an opportunity to lie in bed the whole day with my daughter and watch cartoons. Not only that but I'm conscious of what I spend my time watching, reading or listening to.
Maintaining control in these 3 areas of my life has allowed me the strength and peace to be able to deal with those things in my life that I cannot control. We are not completely helpless to what happens in our lives and sometimes it is making small changes that allows us to see the bigger ones. Cultivate a life that feeds your peace instead of living life dealing with one stressor after the other. You are not in control of everything but choose to steer the wheel in the direction you want in those things that you can control.
