by Tara Joyce | Mar 11, 2015 | Cultural Creativity, My Journey | What's On My Mind, Self/Business Growth
Are there things in your life that feel heavy and “work”-like?
For me, dinner has long felt like a task that really weighed me down. I didn’t like how it needed to be planned, I didn’t like how long it took to make, I didn’t like how short it took to eat, and I didn’t like how I didn’t appreciate how it tasted once I’d cooked it. The action was wholly undesirable to me. Yet I had to eat — and so did my family. What was I to do? I needed to find a way to enjoy the process of the action — the beginning, middle, and end — not just getting to the end, and the results it would bring.
To grow in my enjoyment of my heavy task, I began paying attention to the places in my life where I was able to “play” and enjoy the process of an action, and I paid attention to the places where I was not able to do this. I began noticing if I made time to “play” each day in those spaces that felt good, it supported me in bringing more play into the places that feel more heavy, serious and “work”-like. By contrasting my feelings of “play” and of “work”, I found myself with more space to “play” in the heavy stuff and the lighter it became.
This leads me to connect the “work” of making dinner to the “work” of business ownership; no matter what may feel like “work” in your life, there is immense support available to you through learning about the value of lightness, and how efficient it is in getting stuff done.
photo credit: Anant Nath Sharma
language inspired by Lama Marut’s “Be Nobody”
by Tara Joyce | Dec 19, 2014 | Cultural Creativity
We share stories to share our voice and our perspective in a way we feel will be emotionally impactful. We craft our stories in a particular way, changing them each time we tell them. We craft them from our experience and imagination, and the beautifully unique way we each perceive our world. They’re not the truth, nor our truth. They are our stories.
It’s not even the whole story that we get the privilege of hearing or sharing with each other when we’re storytelling. It’s only a glimpse that we can see, and/or show in our moment of connection together. It might sound like the complete story I’m sharing but please believe me, it’s only part of a greater whole. The truth, my truth, is far more nuanced and complex than my story can share.
If our stories were our truth, we might call them that.
I love stories… but I don’t put a lot of energy into them. My stories and the stories of others are here to entertain, to persuade, to educate but to take them as “the truth” or to hold my own experiences up to them in comparison, is a game I’d rather not play.
I’d rather work on treating stories lightly, for my own health and happiness. They are not “the truth”, nor “my truth”. Our stories are a reflection of us and our own unique way of perceiving things. They’re our version of events. They’re our tools for connection, for empathy and for identity. They’re integral to us but they are not, and can not, be all that we are. We are so much more than our stories.
photo credit: Alessandra Di Nunno