Looking through the lens of your life's work

Last week I came down with a cold, and when I looked at my schedule I felt totally overwhelmed. I hadn’t realized how much I have my life planned out moment by moment, until each piece of my schedule was re-evaluated for how much energy it was going to take. It was humbling to see how much I have been expecting myself to exert day after day, with very little unscheduled, unstructured time. When I went through and started cancelling things, it felt so good!

The tricky part is that my schedule is typically packed with things I genuinely like and want to do. I want to spend time with my family. I want to see friends. I cherish my time with my writing circle. I want to give massage to the regular, faithful clients scheduled this week. I enjoy my work … and the list goes on.

Author and coach/consultant Renee Trudeau goes beyond the usual chipper yet vague urging to “take time for yourself every day” and “follow your dreams” in her post titled Radical Self-Care. She writes about how she often finds herself having to say no to things that really feed her. She says, “I love to help and serve others and have many gifts and talents which allow me to do so on a large scale — whether it’s supporting others to discover their life’s work, experience more balance, grow/expand their business, promote their amazing events/initiatives or remember who they really are.”

But she boils it down to this: “Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should.”

I’ve been rolling along with this notion that if I have a knack for something, it must be important that I get out there and use that gift or talent whenever possible. The problem is, I’ve spent many years developing different skills and exploring new interests, and rather than choose a direction to focus, I’ve tried to drag everything into the current picture. The result is a life filled up with a hodgepodge of work, family, hobbies, passions, and commitments, which is great fun but also a bit disorienting and hard to keep up with. It’s like being in charge of too many kids — no one gets proper attention, and there’s always someone crying.

I’m working on how to shift this. Artist Dean Hanmer addressed this conundrum last year when I interviewed him for The Arc Magazine. He does what he calls Treasure Mapping, which is basically creating a collage from images that represent what you want to create in your life. He uses this to help him choose his commitments, because it’s a visual reminder of his goals, “a real-life daily reminder of what I should be saying yes to without stumbling on my words."

So in order to know what to say yes to, we have to have a sense of our goals or life’s work. For one idea on how to figure this out, check out Steve Pavlina’s article, “How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes.” (He warns that if you don’t believe in having a life purpose, it might take more like an hour.)

When I see the tireless work of so many leaders in the field of adoption education and resources, I know I am witnessing people who are doing more than just tasks at a job — their passion and sense of purpose comes through clearly. When we are highly aware of what we want to create, our impact ripples out into families and into the adoption community in a positive and helpful way.

Looking at our schedules through this lens can be really helpful in knowing what stays and what goes. After all, life is short, and we all have real work to do.