Developing yourself and your life can be a very intense experience. Digging in your past, facing your demons, and designing a future that makes you excited can be, frankly, exhausting. In your quest for peace, joy and purpose you may find that real growth and progress comes in sprints and whirlwinds after lots of reading, questioning, thinking and writing.
There are times, however, usually right after a major bit of progress, when instead of being motivated to keep going or push harder, you find yourself exhausted. I call this spiritual fatigue.
They say the unexamined life is not worth living. But sometimes I wonder if the over-examined life is never lived. To understand ourselves and our humanity certainly seems to be part of the purpose of our lives but not the only purpose by far.
Sometimes we need a break from thinking about our place in the universe. Sometimes we need to just BE in the universe; to just enjoy this life and be down in it experiencing it, unexamined. Mindfully experiencing the moments of our lives is part of the joy of living. You can always return to examining and picking apart your thoughts, feelings, actions and experiences later. But for now, take a break and live this incredible life.
Good times to drop into life and just live include vacations, travel, moments of love, joy and purpose, and the like. On the other hand, good times to spend on a meta-level focused on development include any time of prolonged negative emotion – legal battles, divorces, prolonged illness, and any time you don’t love your current situation.
That is not to suggest that you should not be mindful of your negative emotions – you certainly should. But self-development and life-development are not only a great break from any negative reality; they are they are the pathway out of it. The simple act of taking action to better yourself and your life makes any hard situation easier to handle.
For example, suppose you are in debt. When you realize what you are up against, it can feel hopeless and intractable. But then you make a plan and act on it consistently, you will feel almost instantly lighter and happier, long before you finish paying it off.
Likewise, suppose you are meeting your child or grandchild for the first time. If you spend every moment looking at it from the outside, you will miss what if feels like to make that first connection.
As you take a break from developing your life to actually live your life, be careful that you do not fall back into destructive patterns of self-sabotage. Whatever neuroses you have not dealt with (known and unknown) are still in play. Keep your breaks brief – moments, days or weeks – and keep guard for anything you may do that would set you back. For breaks longer than a day or two, I recommend making yourself a set of rules to follow to ensure you will not sabotage your progress.
We have a choice to be in the moment or to examine the moment. With practice, you can do both nearly simultaneously. If you are not there yet, that is OK. And it is OK to take a break from your self-examination, planning and development.
How do you know when you need a break? Can you spot the fatigue?
