Some Self Reflection

Things have been so crazy and busy with school and work and everything that falls outside of those two categories that I've barely felt I had a moment to myself recently. I'm trying to make my workouts a mental muscle-memory reaction, be an efficient employee, prepare for my project and testing, keep my expanding philosophical thoughts expanding at their exponential rate by participating in some interesting conversations, and keep up my end in the blogosphere.

Many of these things are supposed to be outlets for the stress, but lately they've all been jumbled up with it. My husband asked me yesterday a bit about how I'm approaching life* and why I gather stress, so that I can remember how to let that stress go. What do I really need to work on and use as a focus for my activities?

This led me to some self-reflection about how I'm looking at the world. The great thing about liking to look at things holistically is that everything is connected. The bad thing about liking to look at things holistically is that everything is connected. It's great to be able to carry the good moments and connect them to the more mundane bits of my life, but it's difficult when stress becomes the overriding factor of the interconnected world I live in. While compartmentalization could be a simple solution to this problem, I don't like to chop my life up into bits. I needed to remind myself that when it comes to helping others, I like to keep positive about the options and possible paths ahead of them in hopes that they'll see the positive paths too. That is an outlook that I should carry over into every aspect of my life. There are several areas in my life in which I've been searching for a dao (a path, a way) to walk. Sometimes it looks like there's no path ahead of me that isn't painful and stressful and dark and dreary. I realized yesterday that this isn't the case. What makes the paths look that way is that I'm resistant to them.

It's time to spread my positive attitude to the stressful parts of my life. The fact is I have to walk a path. Why not like the path I'm walking? After all, this is what I'm making of myself.

What path are you walking? When do you set aside time to reflect? Please feel free to leave a comment!

*I must say, this is one of the many fabulous perks of being married to a philosopher. It's in his job description to think about and question and prod things. It makes for an interesting time around the house.