If you are lucky enough to stay alive long enough, many things will fall apart or fall away. If you are lucky, what you are left with might be what is most important.
If you are lucky enough to stay alive long enough, there may well come a time when your focus tightens in on what is essential in life.
If you are lucky enough to stay alive.
At a certain point, the realisation might dawn that there are things in life that are worthy of your time, and things that are not. What seemed urgent, vitally important in one moment, might at the next reveal itself to be trivial.
Things fall apart. Things fall away. If you are lucky, what you are left with is what is most important.
Voyage of discovery
Last year was a turning point in my life. I reached a crisis point in my mental and physical health.* One by one, many aspects of my life as it was unravelled, collapsed, or came to a natural conclusion. Looking back, I wonder if the experience of last year was one of so-called “creative destruction”.
What follows destruction (creative or otherwise)?
I am concentrating this year on putting my life back together, rebuilding many aspects from the ground up.
Things look different now to how they looked before all this.
One unexpected but wonderful path of discovery over recent months has been the process of starting my own business. I am working as an HR data, research and content solutions consultant. You can read a little about what my work involves on my LinkedIn page, should it be of interest. The running-a-business side is a voyage of discovery for me – and one that I am enjoying immensely. There are so many things that I am doing for the first time. Wherever possible, I am taking advice from those who have gone this way before me. My wife gave me some good advice from her own time running her own business: Never do your own tax returns.
Heeding my wife’s wisdom, I have engaged the services of an accountant for the first time in my life. The other day, my accountant was talking to me about the self-employment life, and asked what my aims were. Without pause, I said that in light of the mental and physical health issues I have dealt with over the past year or so, my main priorities going into this had been:
- Not dying.
- Getting my mental and physical health back on track.
Everything and anything else is a happy bonus to or by-product.
I think my accountant was slightly taken aback by my candour. I surprised myself by how readily these priorities came to me, and by the extent to which my focus had tightened in on what is essential.
If I am lucky enough to stay alive long enough, things will surely change again beyond all recognition from how they are now. I can only hope that I maintain some awareness of what is most important in life.
Each day in your life
You don’t need to hit a certain age and/or a certain crisis point in your life to recognise and focus on what is most important or essential in life.
You can refine your focus anew, each day in your life.
One way to do this is by putting a few moments’ thought into how you move and how you breathe. Another example of my wife’s wisdom that I am thankful I heeded was when she suggested I give YouTube yoga videos a try, way back in 2016.
Without either meaning to or realising, through doing yoga on a daily basis all these years, I have found that I can now do intermediate yoga routines. A little while ago, I tried a great video on the Yoga with Kassandra channel, which speaks directly to how specific forms of yoga can help process and move past stresses or other things that do not serve you.
This is a tapas yoga practice, tapas meaning “to burn”. I don’t know if I could describe tapas yoga as enjoyable. Indeed, in the heat of the moment, it can be the opposite of enjoyable.
Tapas yoga is about moving through difficult, often uncomfortable poses as a way of achieving mental clarity. Kassandra says:
“Tapas is the niyama of austerity. Stoking the inner fire as a form of purification, as a way to clarify what is true, what is important and what is real to us. Dropping the excess. Letting go of the clutter.”
At the end, Kassandra describes how and why this challenging routine can help burn off that which is not of use to you:
“Really feel what this has shifted, the effects of this work, what came up for you throughout this practice. I find there’s so much we can learn about ourselves when we challenge ourselves in this way. Kind of lingering in discomfort. It’s not easy, but we can really grow from it in meaningful ways.”
Lingering in discomfort with deliberate focus and discipline can help you move through and past things that cause you discomfort in other areas of your life.
If you are lucky enough to stay alive long enough, many things will fall apart or fall away. If you are lucky, what you are left with is what is most important.
If you are lucky enough to stay alive.**
May you be nothing but kind today, to others and to yourself.
May today be nothing but kind to you and yours.
RESOURCES
- Mental health (NHS) Information and support for your mental health from the NHS.
- Information and support (Mind) Resources from Mind, the UK mental health charity.
- NAMI Homefront (NAMI) Online resources from US charity NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness).
- SANE Australia Visit the site of this “national mental health charity making a real difference in the lives of people affected by complex mental health issues”.
FOOTNOTES
* I have written about my ongoing mental health journey in the following posts: Into the infinity of thoughts; Renewal; and No words?; Mental health first response; Glorify; In our darkest hours; and At the heart of things; No feeling is final; Relax harder.; and Anxiety: Your own worst enemy; All these moments; and Mental health: Six things I’ve learnt in 2022; Coping?; The sun will return; Gratitude; Mental health: Night and day; Transitions; Peace?; and It’s OK to forget.
** There is of course a very good song about the importance of staying alive, which also lends it title to this post – namely the immortal Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees.
IMAGES
- TUR William Turner Sunset Scarlet D24666 10 via Wikimedia Commons.
- Joseph Mallord William Turner 038 via Wikimedia Commons.
- Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) – Sunset – N01876 – National Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.
MJCarty 
