Are We Trying Too Hard?
by Donna Sherman
Do you sometimes feel like you should be more because you know more? Our feeds are filled with advice and suggestions for making ourselves happier, healthier, smarter and optimized. I've used the "optimized"word and creed myself and with people I have worked with but now I am questioning it and letting it go because,there is this steady hum inside of me that is asking me to get real.
Do we all really need to keep aiming for the 3 and 4.0 versions of ourselves? What does that even mean?
Do you ever feel similarly?
So here is a thought experiment which is NOT designed to leverage tools and/or optimize any aspect of our lives but, instead it is something altogether different:
What if we make a list of our character flaws, our emotional weaknesses, our cognitive black holesand our health weaknesses?What if we looked at them as textures in our personalities and rough edges in our abilities?What if we accepted that in some dimensions of our lives we do, and have done, what we can and simply cannot be adept at certain things? What if we let go of our reflexive desire to fix our deficits?
What if we let ourselves be the multi-faceted ,contradictory non-optimized beautiful beings that we are?
Is one of the gifts of being in your 60s a wise and accepting reconciliation of what it means to be whole and wholly flawed? To know that you can live with gusto and know that you can’t suck the marrow out of every aspect of life? Yes, I think so.
This reconciliation does not feel like defeat, regret or a lessening of life force; it feels more like shedding some of the extraneous tools in the self help toolkit while walking forward with a lighter, brighter and far more deeply satisfying way of being, working and loving in this delicious and difficult life.
