“Above all else guard your heart for everything you do flows from it.”
Emily Ley is the author of When Less Becomes More, and her book has truly been helpful for me to make “space for slow, simple, and good”, her book’s subtitle.
This piece of art is more than its Tiffany blue color cover, vibrant and personal family photos, the joyful graphics, and just over-all gorgeous aesthetics. Ley has so much to share about living a life that chooses less rush and more rhythm, less liking and more loving, less noise and more calm, less distraction and more connection, less frenzy and more soul rest, less fake and more real, less fear and more community, less great and more good, less chasing and more cherishing, and less stuff and more treasures.
She has challenged me as someone who identifies with the enneagram 3 of choosing rhythm when it comes to my busy schedule. I am trying to not fill it up to the brim where I have nothing left to give.
My husband and I get to start a community bible study group that meets on Tuesdays, and I am trying my absolute best to not live to the brim of my life where I feel like at any given moment something is going to spill.
I want to live a life that is conscious of the contents in my life, and that takes the time to empty, expand and make space where there is room for more rhythm, love, calm, connection, soul rest, community, goodness, authenticity, and community.
Saying yes to community group is saying yes to my faith, wellness, soul-rest, and it is saying no to a Tuesday night that at times would only get filled with the unintentional mundane.
I was listening to a podcast called Monday Morning One, and it was challenging me to keep the promises that I make to myself as the core of self-care.
A time management tool that Monday Morning One taught me is to take an hour in a day before the start of the workweek to write out all of the tasks, to-dos, and big projects that need to get done in that given week and write how long you promise yourself to get that task done.
After doing this, you then plan these non-negotiable promises into your planner and choose to honor yourself by one, doing it, and two, completing it within that time frame (music to an enneagram 3’s ears).
This may sound counter-intuitive where you are reading about Ley’s approach to life with “making space for slow, simple, and good”, and then hearing about the Monday Morning One strategy of productivity.
It is not counter-intuitive.
In order to live a more intentional life where we are not living our lives to the brim, it takes being more intentional to empty, expand, and make more space.
We can only do this through self-reflection and evaluation of how those demanding tasks coexist with the values that we desire to live by.
I know there are plenty of tasks that should only take 30 minutes to an hour, but end up eating up hours of my day because I am unfocused and unable to keep promises to myself that I haven’t consciously made.
For example, I know cleaning my home for my community group this week is a high priority, and I know the level that I desire to clean should only take up to 2 hours with my husband’s help if we both clean undistracted if I choose “good enough” instead of perfection if I choose to focus in on the sole purpose of community versus being obsessed with making perfect impressions.
“Sometimes good is beautiful…and great can be a little exhausting.”
Keeping promises to ourselves allows us to care for ourselves better; we just need to know what promises that need to be made.
Let’s choose to make more space for the slow, simple, and good by choosing to honor ourselves enough to self-reflect, plan, and keep promises to ourselves.
“Protect the space in your head and heart as holy, and allow only what’s truly and specifically significant in.”