I’ll be fifty next month and throughout this year my word/work of the year has been “Distill” (last years was “Release”) because my life has been quite full, especially in the last 25 years and not always in ways that have felt helpful to the overall work I’ve determined to be mine to do while I’m here. This could be due to the various interests I have and limited amount of time there is to explore them or because I decided that having children would be interesting. I imagine it’s a combination of the two.
As we age it’s often inevitable that our sense of time shifts, to feel that it’s moving faster and faster is accurate in some sense because we have less of it the longer we live. It’s also known though that the more diversity, and to some degree, novelty, that our lives have, the slower time seems to pass – but ultimately the passing of hours continues to happen no matter our perspective about it.
Since we spend something like a third of our life working, it’s reasonable to question (occasionally, if not more often) if what we’re doing for work is meaningful, adding to our life, and affording us the kind of life we want to live outside of the time spent working. So, release and distill it is!
The challenge I’ve encountered over the last two years with these words are how I’ve broken down the work itself, since originally I’d assigned topics for each quarter to focus on: Things, Physicality, People, and Conditioning. Yes, this whole other project of determining exactly how to release and distill has felt like, to some degree, an exercise in futility…since any of us who’ve been engaged in therapeutic work, for example, have experienced the challenges with letting go of the ways in which we know our selves to be in favor of becoming who we know we are capable of being, especially in a relatively short amount of time. But change is possible, I know because I have experienced it over the last two years (even if only in often small ways).
Initially (and still) these areas of work to focus on, to essentially free more time and energy for what’s most important in my life, made the most sense given my experience of life so far. Since the work of life entails loving most, if not all, of whatever that looks like, it’s becoming clearer to me in this distillation application (and by distill I mean to further determine with what was left over after having released that which no longer was necessary last year how to best utilize the four aspects for efficiency) that it’s just not as simple as it sounds or that I thought it might be. But it has been functional and helpful where I’ve been able to make progress.
I love the work I get to engage in as much if not sometimes it seems more than, the people nearest and dearest to me. This is something I’ve sat with even more so over the last two years because I’ve wondered if it’s really love for my work I’m feeling versus something less worthy of my time – right now, as I take a rest day and am writing this, I can say that if it weren’t really love I was feeling for all that I get to be a part of then I wouldn’t be engaging in it. Perhaps that’s still some conditioning at play though, I am curious to determine this more succinctly next quarter when the focus is on that again.
What is the work outside of your work that you want to tend to? Be it on the social/emotional side of things or the legacy/spiritual side? Do you have the time you want for what’s most important to you right now – if not, what do you need to let go of or distill to feel true to what you love most?
TimeSpaceOne 