This week I decided to do a mini-experiment which I labelled the daily reconnect. It’s basically a way of making sure that I take time to pause each day and make space for myself. In other words, it’s little doses of loveliness that are peppered through my day.
I’m still trying to figure out the whole ‘structuring time’ thing after making the transition to self-employed life. I’m naturally a ‘do-er’ but some days I find that I’ve been so buried in my work that I’ve made no time to pause. Other days, I allow work to seep into my days off, so I have no downtime. As a result, there are times when I feel drained and uninspired.
The daily reconnect is my attempt to counteract this by putting in a supportive structure to add fun and variety to my days.
Morning pages
The idea came about as a moment of inspiration when writing my morning pages. If you’ve never written morning pages, I highly recommend them. Anything goes and they can be fun and insightful, or even cleansing as you purge your emotions across the page.
They led me to recognise that in being productive, I was losing sight of myself, and hence the daily reconnect mini-experiment was born.
Daily reconnect
As I wrote, I tried to unpick the key things that would help me reconnect to myself and create a loose structure to work within. I used to have an hour of ‘soul time’ on an evening where I’d take time to check in and reconnect. It was easy to do when living alone, but now that I live with CP, the evenings have become our time.
As I continued to write, I realised that something squeezed in at the end of the day wouldn’t be ideal. I now have the luxury of fluidity during most of my working hours, so pauses during the day are likely to give me a boost, as well as provide space to stop and step away for a while.
The more I wrote, the more the daily reconnect began to take form and eventually I had created a list of lovely things that I felt formed the foundation of maintaining a daily connection with myself. These included:
- Morning pages
- Daily workout
- Meditation
- Creativity
- Reading
- Silence
- Downtime / Rest
- Yoga
Admittedly, I do most of these things, and when I do, they make me feel great. But they’re the first things I neglect when I become ‘busy’. So I’ve decided to turn things on their head and make them a priority for the next 30 days of my mini-experiment and see how I feel.
If I feel less tired and more connected, then they’ve done their job and I’ll be keeping them in place. If not, then I’ll continue to tweak my routine.
Feeling the feels
So far, my daily reconnection opportunities are feeling good. And for me, that’s how I need to assess something, by feeling rather than by thinking (I’m an over-thinker at heart). Since starting this experiment, I’ve even had two whole, luxurious, work-free days where I’ve been able to shut off from the ‘should be’ or ‘could be’ doings and it has felt blissful.
Through November, I’ll continue to make space for the ‘heart work’ and see how I feel. Right now, I’m excited by the possibility of creating more space to reconnect, step back and pause.
Image courtesy of Takwa Abdo.