Once, a few days ago, when I was brushing my teeth at one in the night and looking at the darkness outside the window, I yawned and felt that I was already quite tired and wanted to sleep.
At that moment I thought, “Then why am I still awake?”
The thought immediately crossed my mind: “Because I still have so many unfinished things.”
Previous day is over and I am trying to finish some things from the previous day. How can I finish the things of a day that is over?
No matter what I come up with, you can’t fool yourself – if you’ve planned more than you can, then you definitely won’t do some of it.
The day has very specific limits, and no one can move them. I can’t do yesterday’s things today, because today they are today’s things.
Actually, I don’t really care that I sometimes go to bed late at night. What worries me is that it significantly changes my energy and plans for the whole day.
I am not an owl or a lark, I just live. And in my life there were periods when I woke up long before dawn. There were times when I did not sleep until four in the morning. And there were periods of “stable seven hours”.
We can always learn from nature.
Animals live another way and plants also. They don’t try to put three hours of life into the one or two hours before sleep. In their world, there are no artificial lights, useless expectations, schedules, plans, an endless feed of important events and the syndrome of lost opportunities (Fear Of Missing Out).
When the sun sets behind the horizon – they seem to say: “Thank you, my body, you worked well today – now it’s time to slow down. And tomorrow will be a new day and a new life.”
In this story, I am concerned with the human relationship to life as such.
First, you come up with an image of an ideal day, which in advance does not correspond to reality. Then you subconsciously procrastinate, trying to allocate a little time for relaxation in your tight schedule. But this is not possible, because life does not correspond to the plan – and therefore, along with relaxation, you feel guilty. You feel guilty because the reality does not match the image. The day is coming to an end, and the list is not completed, and you may even want to add a few more points. Then the day crosses the line, and you want to live more, do more, more, more, more. And instead of thanking yourself for a wonderfully spent day, you feel stressed from unfulfilled responsibilities.
Of course, this cannot be absolutely true – every day is different from another. But I’m sure that you also sometimes feel something similar. And I just want to remind myself once again that the joy of life is not to run endlessly to the beat of the clock, but to live according to the barely noticeable beat of own heart.
So now, when I want to continue this story again, when the thought arises that I need a few more minutes, and then some more – I ask myself: “Who? Who needs this? Who will be better off if instead of this much-needed relaxation – I will grab the scraps of other people’s lives? Who will be happy that I will live quantitatively, and not qualitatively? How will the feeling of incompleteness help me feel more complete and healthy?”
The endless stream of unfinished things of the previous day should always, ALWAYS, be finished long before the day is over.