Last week I blogged about feeling stretched to capacity and
needing to simplify life somehow. This may come as a surprise, but the next day
I decided to get a dramatic haircut. Yep, about 10 inches cut off, bangs and
blonde highlights…I haven’t looked like this since I was twelve! I’ve included
pictures of the before and after for you…
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| Down my back, usually in a braid or ponytail |
You may be wondering what in the world a haircut has to do with simplifying life? Well, honestly, it doesn’t make anything simpler. It actually adds a few minutes to my morning routine because now I actually have to style my hair and get my bangs all laying in the right direction in order to be presentable.
I guess you could say I added yet another thing to my plate, and how in the world hasn’t my rubber band snapped yet?! Which is what I would have thought even a few days ago and is why I hadn’t gotten my haircut since shortly before the birth of my first son. No cut, no coloring and very, very rarely did I style or even blow dry my growing locks for almost a year and a half. It was just one of those things that I let go in the midst of so many other demands pulling my time, attention and energy in other directions. I had shrunk my “get-ready-routine” down to a 10-15 minute process…literally just the basics and some days I didn’t even get those 10 minutes done!
After my rant last weekend, I had this depressing feeling that life was just inevitably out of control and I’d be unbelievably busy forever. Yuck! As I thought about what I could cut out and simplify, very few things came to mind. In fact, nothing came to mind. When I isolated any one category of my life and tried to imagine what it would mean to cut it out or “downsize” it somehow, it always seemed like something would be missing. In this imaginary new world with less time to craft or less time to spend with family or less time to clean the house, I was even less satisfied.
And then this thought struck me…what if life isn’t about just the basics? What if we’re meant to take in as much as we can, as often and fully as we can? Not just to feed our bodies, but to feed our hearts - to satisfy our spirits and engage our minds. Yes, to prioritize and to say “no” once in a while, and yes to realize our limitations…but to live beyond the basics. To fill our lives with the things that are truly satisfying…our families, our passions, our hobbies.
As I thought about this idea: To feed my heart….I decided perhaps my solution was less about taking things away from my life that I enjoy and more about changing the way I look at all those “things”.
So this in my experiment…to dive into all the things I love and to go after it all with ferocity and see if that “busy” feeling is overtaken by a deep sense of satisfaction.
And thus, I made time to get my hair cut. And I’ve made time everyday for the past week to style it and show it off. And it feels good…and in some weird way, I feel a tiny bit less busy and a tiny more excited about each day.
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