I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who, let's just say, is burnt out on life. Burnt out on tragedies that have plagued her family, burnt out on keeping up with her children's schedules, burnt out with trying to keep her house clean, burnt out with her job, and burnt out in her marriage. This friend of mine is simply fried.
As I listened to her talk, I recalled many conversations with other friends ( both men and women) who share the same disdain for their current life. I understand the feeling well because I too, have been there.
As we become mothers, fathers, employees, and everything in between, we deplete our resources. We deplete our ability to be grounded, to feel whole again. We feel spread so thin that we fear we very well may tear away from our own bones if one more thing is presented to us, yet we still want to or at least feel the need to be it all and do it all. It's a dangerous place to be in our lives because we aren't really living, we are reacting and trying to survive all the things we put before ourselves and trying to cope with all that comes about unexpectedly. The human mind and body cannot keep up with the demands and eventually, something will fall apart such as our relationships, finances, or our bodies.
Of course the conversation turned toward travel as I suggested she pull the emergency break and plan a trip to get herself back to a functioning place of well-being in both mind, body and soul. I spoke of my Happiness Tour to El Salvador and all that it entails and how it'll be so good for her in so many ways. It'll bring her away from her responsibilities for a while so she can focus on herself, it'll engage her with new cultures and evoke some new inspirations, it'll allow her to give back to others because she wants to and not because she feels she HAS to and she'll have plenty of time to just relax and reflect. But she's fried. Burnt out on life and everything I'd mentioned we'd be doing sounded like work. What she wanted was to find a nice hotel, with a nice beach and a pool and have people wait on her. She wants no demands placed on her at all and I totally understood where she was coming from because sometimes we just want to be taken care of.What I thought to myself as we spoke was, this trip sounds like work but really it's not. It just sounds busy and that's what she already is : busy. But as I described to her that every activity planned was designed and created to be a multidimensional and fulfilling body, mind soul experience. It's about coming back into yourself and filling in the cracks in our life's walls that we've neglected for far too long. It's about dropping the facade of trying to be everything. It's about finding strength in helping others. It's about sheer moments of joy that remind us that we are still, at our core, happy and kind people. It's about challenging our beliefs and opinions about people and places. It's about strategically sprinkling in all the goodness that has we have stripped from our lives and planting and watering those seeds in preparation for growth down the road. It's about recovery of our being.
No, it's not sitting on the beach and resting for a full week. I don't know about you but when I just lay around all day or for several days for that matter, I tend to feel less rested and more restless. Inspiration, challenge, and moving out of our comfort zones breeds hope in our lives that we've gotten so comfortable feeling hopeless in.I want that to change for all of you. Life is short people. We pile way too many things on our plates and expect things to not fall off of them, but pile too much on there and rest assured, you'll have a mess in no time. The same is with our lives. You deserve to be the best version of yourself there is. Treat yourself well, have faith that a good trip will change you for the better. You'll feel the adrenaline of a new experience light your fire and as you return back to your regular life, the seeds of your experience that were planted on your trip will start to grow in ways you've never imagined.
