Life moves pretty fast – take a breath

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”

I’m pretty sure that quoting Ferris Bueller dates me. But I love that film (or more precisely I loved that film as I haven’t seen it for decades – please don’t tell me it’s actually rubbish, it would break my heart). To be honest, in terms of the details I can only remember snippets but I can remember how it made me feel. As an aside that’s my measure of what great art does (and I include films as art – don’t @ me), it kicks me in the feels and give me an emotional thwack across the face with a large salmon.

Anyway, I remember that it made me feel like anything was possible and that if you were just prepared to take a few risks then it would pay off with some huge rewards. But the reason that I bring it up is because of that quote. Ferris Bueller’s Day off is more than 30 years old now (BTW WUT?!??! When did that happen?!?!) but life’s got even easier to miss since Ferris first said that in 1986.

Life moves pretty fast…

Life does move pretty fast. Far too many of us we wake up after a night when we didn’t get quite enough sleep; get ourselves ready for work; commute to the office while stuffed into someone’s armpit*; spend the best hours of our day (during the most productive years of our life) doing things that make us money but are unlikely to fill our souls with joy; then get home after another enervating commute too tired to do anything other than slump in front of Netflix with our dinner while flicking through social media or playing games. Then we look up realise that it’s now tomorrow and we’ve watched one episode too many and stumbling off to bed.

Sound at all familiar?

Rinse and repeat and suddenly you realise that another week, or another month, or another year has gone by. As Ferris might say, you’re missing life.

But can we do anything about it

So is this inevitable? Our gut reaction has to be, “well of course not” but let’s just pause for a minute. Let’s take a breath. The life I describe above is a bit, but only a bit, caricatured. It’s what too many of us experience every day with just minor variations. It’s a life that people complain about. It’s a life that people don’t enjoy. It’s a life that people know is making them physically and mentally ill.

But even knowing all that, people keep on doing it day after week after month after year.

And to be honest when I say “people” I’m actually subtweeting myself. Even knowing that it’s self-destructive we, I, keep on doing it. Well I kept on doing it until a couple of years ago and while I am still doing some of that I’ve also worked out how to stop some of that as I’ll talk about it a bit.

So maybe we should take Mr Bueller’s advice on this. We should look around once in a while.

What’s going on?

So I took a deep breath and looked around at myself a while. What did I see? Why was I living my life this way?

For me there was a combination of the comfort of habit, a desire to do a good job at work (laced with a fear of not wanting to screw up), and a sense of entitlement to some ‘me-time’ when I got home. There is definitely a level of laziness to it as well. Put another way, I was stuck in the cave and I didn’t want to leave.

Also, if I’m honest with myself there was also another fear that if I actually tried to do something about it then it would expose that there wasn’t anything else there anymore. That I’d neglected myself and my relationships so much that if I turned my back on my self-destructive behaviour then I’d be forced to look back at the barren wasteland I had left behind me that I would have to repair.

Pretty dark huh?

However, when I took another breath and squared my shoulders to be really honest with myself I knew that wasn’t the case and that actually what I was really worried about was a bit of awkwardness if I caught up with friends I’d not seen in a while. Or, the pain of starting back from zero if I went to the gym again. Or, the confusion of trying to remember what was going on in the Charles Dickens that I hadn’t picked up for months.

Now all of that will be idiosyncratic to me. My fears and my reasons. I can’t tell you what yours are but if that feeling of life going by pretty fast resonates with you then maybe you need to take a breath and think about why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Can we change? Or, how to eat an elephant

So that’s all well and good, but the real question is what can we do about? Life can feel like such a big complicated mess that it’s just easier to slump back on the sofa or stay in the cave rather than doing anything about it. Well, for me, the answer to that was the same answer to the question of how you eat an elephant – One mouthful at a time.

So it was time for another deep breath. I made a list of the things that were bothering me: the sleep, the commute, work, tiredness, the eating rubbish, the not seeing people, the not doing things. And boy was there a long list. The key thing for me at this point was to give up, not to look at the whole elephant and despair at how much I had to do. But, instead, to just look for that first mouthful. And I started with my morning and my commute. And once that was a bit better I moved onto evenings a couple of months later. And then I moved onto work. And then. And then. I’ll tell you what I did in each of those cases in later blogs. But the key thing for this post is that moment of pausing, taking breath and deciding to change.

Changing was, and is, hard for me. But until I started it was never going to get easier. What I needed to do what to take a breath look at myself. Really look at myself. Yes it was hard, but not as hard as I thought it would be. The hardest thing was deciding to make the change and deciding to take the first step.

And you know what. If I can do it then so can you.

Thoughts?

Do you recognise any of that in yourself or people around you? The self-destructive behaviour? Did you change? Did you want to change? How did you do it? Do you take moments to pause in your life? Does it help?

Would love to hear from you.

*Yes I complete acknowledge that this is London/South East centric as that’s what I am.  I realise that most people don’t work in offices and also that most people work relatively close to where they live so feel free to insert whatever suits your personal situation.  Sorry!