I had a realization last night...in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep because I was thinking too much. It was a simple realization, but once I came to terms with it, I felt fairly liberated. Basically, the upshot was that I could let myself off the hook from my own expectations. I have been thinking for weeks about the things I had to get done this month....it is a super busy month. This weekend my in-laws come to visit, and mentally I've been thinking of all the little things I needed to do to prepare. They rarely come, so of course the pressure is on to have the house looking nice etc. On the list was a new duvet cover for the spare room. Anyway...this week was suppose to be productive for me, but that was thwarted right off the bat when the kids got bad colds on Monday and spent two days home from school. So as I lay awake Tuesday night thinking of all the things I had wanted to get done I realized it just wasn't going to happen, not given the fact I was going to be spending basically at least two days home on lock-down. So I decided that I would give myself permission to not care about the duvet. Silly sounding I know, but the second I gave myself permission to let it go, I felt totally liberated by the concept. The funny thing is that the duvet cover is absolutely microscopic on the list of priorities, and totally self-imposed. I am quite sure no one would care about the duvet (least of all my in-laws who have dramatically different taste than I and will most likely dislike whatever duvet I used anyway).
Anyway, I have been thinking all day about how important it is to let yourself accept that sometimes things won't or can't be as you wanted or envisioned them. We try our best, we work as hard as we can and then you have to just let go of all the self-imposed expectations you have of what should happen to make things perfect. Because if you are like me, the list is next to impossible to keep up with and even though I don't really get too stressed or crazy when things don't actually get done, I sure drive myself insane trying to fit it all in up until the last second. Letting it go before I wasted even more energy on something not important and impossible to complete was liberating--gave me a little more energy to think about stuff I really do need to do (like make sure there is coffee and Sweet and Low which my mother-in-law really would miss if it wasn't there)!!! Signed, ME {lv}
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