What Is Important To You?

"Trust is like blood pressure. It's silent, vital to good health and if abused can be deadly."

-Frank Sonnenberg

Sometimes we get so busy with life's activities that we forget what is most important to us. When we are little, time seems to go so slowly and our time is dictated by our families and communities. As we become adults we are the ones who get busy doing our lives. We work, we do our chores, if we have children we take care of them and tote them to al the places they need to go, we do our activities we get involved with things like church, working out, and then we try to find time for our partners and friends. We get so filled up with things we need to do and push ourselves to do that we sometimes forget what is most important to us.

As we get older we begin to realize again, that doing things is not all that it is cracked up to be and that there are other things than what we have to do, and feel we need to do that are more important. We begin to realize that we may have missed out on some important things like really appreciating our children and the time they need to even just explore and to just be. We rush them because we feel so rushed. I have heard that in many ways grandparents make good parents for children even though they don't have the energy we have when we are younger. What they do have is more perspective and more time or a different relationship with time.

What is most important to you? What has the most weight, in terms of carrying the most importance and in terms of how it feels in your heart? If you are like me at all, my work is certainly important and does carry weight. I am lucky in that I enjoy my work and it constantly challenges me to be better. I also enjoy helping others, and my work allows me to do that. I also value my children, and when I hold them in my heart, they take up a lot of space; they are most important to me. I value my husband, and he is important to me also, but there is just something about my children that feels even greater in a different way. When we take stock of what is most important to us, we then can prioritize differently our to-do lists.

What is important comes from our hearts first. Maybe children even get it right some of the time when they want to eat dessert first. They get it right in that they allow a great desire to take precedence without censoring their selves. What would it be like to wake up in the morning and prioritize our day? Would it change what we do or how we do things? Maybe we still have to go to work or to church or do the shopping or cleaning, but maybe we would spend an extra moment hugging our children, and make the time to go to their game, or take our dogs for a walk, even though it might be more on the short side.

I remember taking my son for a walk when he was small, and even though I was enjoying it, I rushed him along because he wasn't walking fast enough or he was taking the time to look at and explore a weed and I wanted to walk. I remember rushing him in the kitchen when he wanted to help and I didn't want the mess of his helping. Looking back, would I do things differently and appreciate more those little times that are so precious, I would like to think I would; most of the time. But we often unconsciously do things the way our parents did even though we may not have liked it. Becoming conscious of our thoughts and actions are so very integral to our patterns of living and of being and of allowing us to be and do what is most important to us. When we do, we can live more healthy, whole and vital lives and bring more joy and peace into us and into our world.

Shift Your Story/Shift Your Life:

So let's do an exercise that might help us to discover or re-discover what is most important to us. When you get up in the morning, grab a piece of paper or your notebook or pad and get yourself comfortable. Breathe deeply 2 or 3 times and ask yourself what is  most important to you. Write down the first 10 things that come to you. After you have written them down, put them in an order of precedence from most important to the less important. Next, write down how you might organize your day differently so that you can allow yourself to do the most important things to you that day; even if for a  short period of time. Thirdly, write down how you might organize your next year in terms of what you could begin to do differently in your life so that you could begin to live your life more filled with what is most important to you. This  third list would be a goal oriented list. Read these lists over every day for 2 weeks, and see how it impacts your life. Then begin to implement what you can do to achieve your goals for the next year. Please let me know how you liked this exercise if you are so moved. I would love to hear from you.