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Season's Greetings?

Sometimes I write things that do not make sense. I usually do not share this stuff. Unfortunately for you, that is not the case today.

Life feels very busy right now. Busy isn’t always bad. But this feels like the noisy, transactional kind of busy that leaves you tired and unsatisfied with life. It isn’t the good, productive, and fulfilling kind of busy that shouldn’t be discounted as an equally valuable undercurrent in our lives.
It’s the bad kind of busy.

Right now I’ve got 5,062 unread emails. Now in fairness, I’m bad at staying on top of this stuff but that truly seems like a lot. This holiday season it just feels like more than ever before all we are giving each other is the gift of email, of this non-stop banter and back and forth. A perpetual volleying of words and tasks that literally never ends. Have any of your emails ever actually ended? Like with a, okay, thanks, this is done now, goodbye? No! They never end. They just live on and morph into new mindless tasks that actually have no real importance four days or even four minutes after they are sent. And yet it is 11:45 and I’m literally bleeding from my corneas trying to get through them knowing full well how exhausted I’ll be the next day, how I’ll take that exhaustion out on my family.
And for what?

More than ever, this holiday season I have to be okay with letting stuff drop. This is something I have always been terrible at. I am a rule follower. I am the kid who always had her homework done on time, who always followed up, who always showed up, who always outwardly did the right thing. But things are just so noisy and transactional right now that my body is literally screaming DO NOT SHOW UP. BE LATE. DO NOT RESPOND.
You know, I was listening to the radio the other night and a woman called in and they asked her what she wanted most this year for Christmas and you know what she said? A new iPad cover. And for some reason I just can’t stop thinking about this. More than anything, she wants a new piece of plastic or whatever to protect her iPad. Like, she already spent money on one. And it got some much use that she needs a new one. And this is what’s most important to her. And I just thought to myself, well that’s just it.

We’ve all lost our minds.
This year, we need to open ourselves and apparently our iPads up to vulnerability. Let yourself be bad or late at something, forgive yourself for that. Turn in and don’t be afraid of what you might find. As for me? I promise to give you the gift of less. I pledge to let my inbox keep growing and responding to almost nothing. I promise to send you almost no emails (I may have one or two more up my sleeve but otherwise I’m completely out of Internet gas). I pledge to share with you no social media snark. Because I am exhausted of a world seemingly comprised of camps of people who think in ways that never intersect on anything and who are all also entirely right about everything all of the time. For this makes no sense.

Instead, I am going to fill up on my family, gratitude, and good things. I am going to do less transactional stuff in the short term because it is making me exhausted. I am going to seek out more of the real kind of busy-ness, the good kind, that fills me up in a happy way, and that leaves me falling on my pillow with a smile on my face and a full heart knowing that it was all worth it today.
Does any of this make any sense? Probably not. Instead, I leave you with a bunch of happy random stuff. I call them links of awesomeness. Love on. Put more in to you and those you love. Do less. Please forget all the rest of it. Because that’s what matters this holiday season and actually that’s really all that ever matters.

Love,

Jenn
 

Comments

  1. Nina BDecember 10, 2014 at 12:29 PM

    LOL: "This year, we need to open ourselves and apparently our iPads up to vulnerability." But true! This was another great post. I look forward to all of them, Jenn.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AlexisDecember 10, 2014 at 7:13 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

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