How often do you intentionally do things for you?
How often do you take the time to celebrate yourself, or process and think about your life? How often do you take the time to truly live for YOU?
These are some of the questions that I have been grappling with for the past few months.
In December, I graduated college, moved back home and started working, all in the span of one month. This was such an exciting time in my life but also one of the faster paced seasons of my life; it was as though I came home and just hit the ground running. In the midst of all of this, I realized that things were moving quite fast and though I was moving with the times, I was not fully present in the changes that were occuring in my life.
Yes, I showed up for myself on certain occasions but I was truly not present in observing the changes, growth and challenges that were happening.
In the midst of all this, I realized I was living for a checklist and not really intentionally living the life that I want to live or the life I want to build.
In life, we all have these different checklists. Checklists for things we want to accomplish, things we want to grow through and learn from, and even checklists for the timelines we create for our lives. In 2021, I was definitely living through a checklist because that was the year that I committed to graduating early, moving home, get settled in, and essentially start my career back home; for that season of my life, it made sense for me to be living through a checklist. When we fast-forward to the future, I am slowly realizing that I did myself a big disservice because this “checklist” mentality has spilled into my season of “intentionality.
Checklists are good for certain seasons but when they begin to spill into your overall view of your trajectory, it might become a bit of a sticky situation. When we live for ticking off lists, we lose the bigger picture of experiencing all these different shifts in our lives. Our focal point becomes checking off the list, without even thinking of what lessons we are learning, how we are growing, and even how the relationships around us are changing. In realizing this, I have had to move away from the “checklist” mentality to more of a holistic mentality. In doing this, I realized there are a lot of things that I had not celebrated for accomplishing, there were relationships in my life that were changing without even realizing it, and most of all I was losing out on a lot of experiences, in the name of ticking off a list.
So I say this to say what?
Yes, we have checklists for things we may want to accomplish in life but this shouldn’t take away from your overall life experience. Living strictly to tick off a list is like watching trailers and never settling to watch the movie. Don’t settle for being a set manager when you are the director of your movie. Live intentionally and live to enjoy every change, every piece of growth, every single moment.
It’s time to check off the list of living intentionally.
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