Is This Frivolous, Or Is It Necessary?
Frivolity to one is a necessity to another.
What is essential to you? What holds you together as an individual - grounds you on this earth and in this space, without which you’d feel out of sorts? This is a question only you can answer. Sometimes, I find that I don’t know exactly how off I feel until something changes and I see the light of a new day, the turning of a season.
I think about this as spring begins to make it’s grand entrance. We’ve been teased with warm, dare I say, balmy days. These days have been like sparks igniting for my soul.
Sometimes the necessary has to change based on circumstances. We are not always in a place to access the rituals and practices that ground us most intensely and efficiently.
A massage or a weekend away is reserved for times of plenty - plenty of time, money, access. Those things are cool. However, I’m more interested in what helps me feel at home in my body and soul - wherever I am in the world.
Running is something that efficiently and intensely returns me to a state of balance, freedom, and lightness. Unfortunately, running is not always accessible. Sometimes old injuries show their face again after years of absence - reminding me to be humble, to slow down, and to not rely so wholly on one metric for a sense of well-being.
Frivolity cannot be measured by someone outside the circuit.
We must take the measure of our own circumstance.
How to find your essential, your necessary:
Identify your values
A behavior has to be deemed important by the brain - important enough to replicate consistently. Lining up our actions with our values essentially makes it easier to do hard things. A hard thing is defined as something that we have to prioritize outside of our basic responsibilities as an employee, partner, parent, sibling, friend, etc. I’m not necessarily talking about lifting a heavy item or running a marathon - though these actions might line up with values for you. I’m talking about committing to 10 minutes of meditation every day, or committing to going to bed at a certain time every night. These seemingly simple pursuits can feel impossibly big when it comes to actually doing the behavior versus thinking about it and desiring it.
Make a list of your values. What are important characteristics for you to grow and develop in yourself? How do you imagine your best self moving through the world?
Go small - allow that small thing to accumulate
Identify one action that you can take to move you closer to what you identified above. It might be a behavior but it also might be a thought exercise like reframing negative self-talk or taking 3 deep breaths before responding to someone. Commit to one small practice for yourself - build a ritual around it. Make it as important as the other essentials in your life. Pair it with another essential you are already doing to avoid building an entirely new habit. i.e You arealready making a pot of coffee every morning - pair it with filling up your water bottle and putting it on your desk for example.
These are not insignificant actions. They build your trust in yourself to do things that make you feel human - that are essential. In the book I’m reading right now (Exit West by Mohsin Hamid), a woman who escaped a war zone finds herself in a beautifully luscious bathroom where she is able to take a shower. She takes her time and as she washes her body and her clothes and feels fully human for the first time in a long time as she washes away a bit of her pain.
“What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight” - Mohsin Hamid
Doing this work alone is hard. Working with someone, a Registered Dietitian trained in behavior change for example, can help smooth the wrinkles as the work begins, continues, evolves.
Till next time,
Natalie