continually surprised & amazed, pt. 2
adventure, story, & the culmination of my own growth & investment!
⏰✌🏼🚂 time to train! Happy gym selfie
Three days ago, on my drive home from work, I recorded the following blog post as an ad-lib voice memo (the second one this week!).
It turned out to be much longer than I expected, and it has become the largest project I’ve taken on so far on Everyday Magic!
I’ve transcribed and edited it into a four part series (which has taken hours, spread across a few separate work sessions in the last two days!), and each part also includes the attached audio file, raw and unedited, as a sort of podcast-style addition to the series — the origin of the whole project. If you’d like to listen instead of, or along with, reading, here you go!
*note: the audio file came first, but talking and listening is different from reading and writing, so some edits have been made below for clarity and brevity, as well as minor add-on thoughts I had while transcribing. Thus, the audio and textual versions are nearly identical, but not quite.
The third aspect of life right now I’m really proud of and delighted by, where I find a lot of happiness and success, is the gym! I’m proud of my training life and of lifting. I love to lift.
I’m proud of sticking with it, despite now having to get up at 4:15 in the morning, which is hard for me. Adjusting to a new sleep schedule, not getting enough sleep during the week. Training before work, with an earlier start time and longer drive. I’m proud of not letting those things be obstacles or deterrents, and I love building my muscles, working out, and feeling strong and capable.
Those are kind of the three key elements (work, blog, gym) to my life and happiness right now. Of course, like I said, life always involves imperfections and frictions. Some of those are happening in my relationships. Even if not frictions, just less attention, perhaps, as I’m busy with other things.
I think as a finite human with finite resources to allocate as you see fit, there are going to be times when certain things get pushed to the back burner because you don’t have the energy and resources to give one hundred percent in every area, which means what you get back won’t be one hundred percent in every area.
You get out of something what you’ve invested into it, and I am pouring so much creativity, love, passion, excitement, etc., into my job right now, into my blog, into the gym, although the biggest of those is my job, for sure. Which I’m just thrilled about! I can’t tell you how long it’s been that I’ve felt stuck in jobs I no longer wanted or didn’t even like in the first place. Situations that weren’t right for me, where I was there for far too long, especially the last one (which is really saying something, since I was only there for about nine months!).
I cannot tell you what a difference it makes to do something you love everyday. To spend my time on something worthwhile, meaningful, and personally connected and aligned. Something I WANT to be doing. Something I’m proud of and delighted by.
Doing what I love was something I believed in for a long time, and I’ve experienced it before, and then I experienced the opposite. Now here I am again, and I can’t tell you how much joy this has added to my life and the stark difference and contrast I have noticed, based simply on how much different I feel now that this specific dread and emptiness is gone. That dread is missing, and it’s being replaced with joy and happiness, and it is astonishing.
(A million rabbit trails and thought threads I’m trying to tie together here!)
So, the energy allocation thing, I think means as you pour more and more of yourself into something, there is less of you to pour into other things. Generally. Though I really don’t believe that’s always true, because I think there are plenty of things you pour a lot yourself into and get so much back that you have MORE to give than if you hadn’t invested in that in the first place. An example is the gym for me; if I don’t workout, I feel a lot worse, and I believe that makes me have less to contribute and makes me feel worse in my body and my mind than if I go. So, yes, it takes a lot, I expend a lot of effort, energy, and investment in the gym, which I care about so much, but it’s not like I leave there feeling as if — to use the spoon analogy — that took twenty of my spoons, because it also gives twenty-two back, for example!
So I’m not saying things only take your energy, but I think when you are spreading your energy and resources across different categories, you can only hold so many at once. In some ways, partially just due to the adjustment and newness of this season — not merely due to energy or resource allocation, but also thanks to having a big job change only six weeks ago! And we know adjustments and newness typically come with growing pains — because of all these things, I think my marriage is something where I don’t feel one hundred percent delight, ease, joy, success, closeness, happiness right now. Like I’m saying about my job, my blog, the gym. Those things feel better than they’ve ever felt.
Well, disclaimer, the gym doesn’t. It feels GOOD, but now I have to get up so early for it, and I have less time to spend there than I did before. There have been times in the past couple years when the gym has been a little more successful than now. But my personal life in general, especially work, and the big picture, is better than it’s been for me in a long time.
That’s not necessarily true of Jake’s and my relationship right now, in this very second. The past couple of weeks. In this small snapshot. In this little growing pain and season of newness and adjustment, our relationship has kind of taken a bit of a backburner, which we’re talking about and working through together, but I feel the effects of it.
So that makes me think about energy allocation, and if most of my energy is going into all these other things, not all of my creative and loving energy is going into my marriage. Which is okay! There can be seasons and times for that, and everything ebbs and flows, you know? Everything comes back around. There are cycles to these things, and our marriage is strong and resilient and beautiful and built on love, trust, teamwork, and friendship. I know I can have faith and belief that in the long run, all these things I’m doing in my personal life to expand my own personal passion, life satisfaction, fulfillment, and wonder, will only feed back into the relationship positively, which is a good reminder for me when I’m feeling despairing about any aspect. So I know I can have faith, belief, and trust that everything is going to swing back around. That my marriage will once again be one of those areas that makes me think, “oh my gosh, this is better than it’s ever been!” Maybe not today, but it will! That’s what I’m saying: you can’t have everything perfect all at once, and there will always be some kind of friction or challenge.
