Don’t Let 30 Minutes Take the Rest of Your Day

I have been thinking about the balance of life. Between its beauty and its pain - and how I can spend more of my time inside its beauty.

I have spent years building a life filled with rituals, communities and people I love.

My morning walk. My coffee shop. The connections I have created. Two amazing children. Old friends. New friends.

None of this happened accidentally. I have deliberately created a life in which, most of the time, I feel good about myself and the world around me.

But then there is work. And there is the wider world.

Friction. Frustration. Disappointment. Disrespect.

None of these things can be avoided entirely. From time to time, life requires me to walk into the swamp.

The question is: how do I leave the swamp behind when my time there is done?

Protecting my inner world does not mean becoming unaffected by what happens around me. Disrespect will still anger me. Disappointment will still hurt. Difficult experiences will still reach me.

It means becoming more discerning about what I allow to remain.

One negative interaction does not deserve to take possession of the rest of my day. I cannot always control what reaches me from the outer world, but I can become more deliberate about what I carry, what I release and what I continue to make room for.

That is the difficult part: learning how to take the hit without carrying it forward.

Perhaps it is like sport. The best players still miss the shot, lose the point and make mistakes. What separates them is not that failure leaves them unaffected. It is their ability to process what happened, reset themselves and become fully available for the next moment.

They do not allow one lost point to become an anchor dragging behind them for the rest of the game.

Life asks the same of me, just away from the sporting field.

I will still need to enter the swamp from time to time. I will do what is mine to do and feel what is mine to feel.

But when that moment has passed, I will wash off the mud and return to the beautiful things.