On Evergreen Renewal (Living Resonant Lives on Labour Day Weekend and Every Day)

I love the change in seasons. It is always a time for me for pause and renewal. A time to reset along with the transition of the seasons.

I have enjoyed this summer. It has been full on as always with lots of love and laughter, time with family and friends and in the midst, me, trying to catch up on everything I have planned all year that I thought I would get to in the summer “when things slowed down.”

Things slowing down is, of course, a fallacy.

There has been no slowing down externally. Work still needs to get done, plans keep being put in place to fill the fall, kids still have summer camps and back to school needs. The pace of our world has not changed these summer months and it will not change as long as we live in a world and in communities that require our effort to be maintained, sustained and renewed. Some form of work, even if only to meet our basic physical/physiological needs, let alone our need for self-actualization and living a meaningful life, is inherent to the human condition and to be clear, meaningful work is one of the factors influencing social determinants of health. Yet, we can be challenged when work feels like it never ends and that it is hard to find time to truly renew ourselves. This is the problem we continue trying to solve with notions of work-life balance. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has gifted us with a move towards remote and hybrid work arrangements, workload and work intensity concerns have continued to grow. The convenience of being at our home desks has also equated to many working longer hours as our work and lives now blend even further. But another gift of the pandemic has been rethinking (dubbed the Great Rethink) what living a meaningful live means and looks like to so many of us. It is easy to lose sight of this opening and revert back to old habits, but this is a moment and opportunity in the world for all of us to think, act and interact differently with each other and our world, if many of the transformations we have hoped for are to be realized. Though transformation requires fundamental changes at every level of systems, the most important unit of systemic change is each and every one of us.

As I prepare for the fall and have been in one too many metaphorical “calm before the storm” conversations, I am reminded, that all the rest, time off and vacations in the world will not sustain me if I do not carry an attitude and stance of inner rest with me into the season ahead. As I reflected on this in the context of all the foreboding conversations about the “busyness” ahead after Labour Day, I have been reminded of something I heard a speaker say a long time ago—that in our world today, we now live to work and work at organizing our play. In sum, we live in a reality where we spend most of our productive waking hours at work and we work hard to orchestrate vacation and vacation plans meant to be the antidote to our work-filled lives. To be clear, every break and vacation can be helpful resets, but does not sustain the energy we need for our lives, if work returns to the center, to the exclusion of everything else. We may not have control over the pace of change and all the work needed in our world, but each of us does have control over our inner experiences, no matter how much is going on around us.

So as we move into a change in season, I have been asking myself: How else might I continue to design an evergreen, resonant life? I am still holding the question, but here are some of the micro habits I am cultivating to live and lead from a stance of evergreen renewal...see full post here...