You Can Love Your Life and Still Feel Depleted By Its Demands
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how much I loved my life even when its demands depleted me.
I have been talking to fabulous women about their lives, their businesses, their families, and the legacy they have been building with every decision they make. In the process, I have been sharing some of the visions for my life I once nurtured as I walked the hallways of buildings between meetings. I had spent decades creating success for other people's businesses, clients, and non-profits. What I imagined was that same work under my own name.
The life I envisioned and the one I was living seemed to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. I loved my life, though. I loved being a mother. I loved the career I was building and the people I worked with and on behalf of, which takes me to today's topic.
A life can remain fully functional while leaving almost no room for the future a person still wants.
In the daily version of that life, you get the job done, meet your responsibilities like clockwork, and attend to the necessary solutions to the problems in front of you. In that version of life, other people can rely on you. I am certain you value much of what you have built and feel genuine gratitude for the people, commitments, and opportunities in your life.
You can love your life and still feel depleted by its constant demands. You can love your life and still dream of a version of it where the hallways you walk are the ones you have built for yourself and in your name.
The light, for me, came when I stopped treating that other life as something that would begin once the one I had became less demanding. It never did. There was always another meeting, another deadline, another person who needed something, another problem worthy of attention. Responsibility does not eventually exhaust itself. A full life keeps generating reasons to remain exactly where your attention already lives.
What changed was my understanding of what the future requires. The future requires conditions.
Time that belongs to something before the day consumes it. Decisions made before exhaustion makes them for you. Money directed toward an intention rather than whatever arrives first. Boundaries that preserve enough energy to think beyond obligation. A plan honest enough to account for the life you actually have rather than the one you wish would become less complicated.
Of those, money is the one most often left to chance. Whatever arrives first will always feel more urgent than the future, because the bill has a due date and the future does not.
The future also requires action. Sometimes embarrassingly small action. A conversation. An application. An hour protected on the calendar. A page written. A name registered. A class taken. A decision finally made after months of revisiting it.
I have watched women begin there. They did not suddenly become people without responsibilities. Their families remained their families. Their work still required them. Bills continued arriving. The circumstances that had consumed so much of their attention did not politely disappear because they had decided to want more.
They began creating conditions in which something they wanted could exist alongside everything already required of them.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me. We spend enormous amounts of time imagining that a different future requires a different life first. Sometimes it requires a different relationship with the life already in front of us. It requires deciding that everything cannot maintain an equal claim on our attention simply because it has been allowed to claim it before.
That is where possibility becomes practical. The woman who had talked about opening a bakery for years eventually opened one. Another began shaping the career and adventures she had imagined for herself. Another stepped more fully into leadership and public speaking. None of those futures appeared because someone finally handed them an empty calendar.
The hallways I once walked between meetings belonged to organizations I respected and work I valued. I learned inside them. I became much of who I am inside them. The fact that I could imagine hallways of my own did not diminish any of that. It simply meant there was more. That possibility deserves more than the portion of our lives left over after everything urgent has been satisfied.
Perhaps that is the examination worth making when the future begins appearing too often in your own thinking.
Look at the future you continue to imagine. Then look at the life you are living now.
Where could you begin creating the conditions for both to exist?
If you recognize yourself in this, join me for a free Women Nexus™ Live webinar.
