Roadblocks to Intentional Living

I’ve been diving into the process of intentional living and sharing my journey here. In my first post on the subject, I talked about clarifying your priorities, passion and purpose. Once you do this, you can consciously decide what to include in the contents of your day. When you know what is most important, you can begin letting go of the rest.

However, I am learning that being intentional is more difficult than it sounds. That is because we are human and we live in a busy, distracting, demanding world. In fact, I’ve identified a handful of roadblocks to living intentionally, and I’m sure there are more I haven’t thought of.

HALT

If you are in recovery, or are close to someone who is, you’ve probably heard the acronym HALT. It stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired, and identifies these four feelings as warning signs or triggers that can sabotage our efforts to stay sober.

I think that these four emotions make everyone vulnerable, not just those who are trying to break free from addiction. If you start your day tired, if something happens to make you really angry, if you have that persistent loneliness occupying your heart space, or that gnawing hunger in your belly, you will not be open or agreeable to being your best self.

These feelings, and any other strong emotions, can turn our best intentions into stagnant failure, which makes us feel even worse.

People who have struggled with addiction are especially susceptible to letting emotions get the best of them. Their method of dealing with uncomfortable feelings was always to numb them and stuff them away.

It is essential, then, when in recovery, to take the time to identify your feelings and learn to sit with them. To realize that they come and they go, just like clouds drifting across the sky that is the canvas of your day. Emotions are okay. Consistently letting them derail your day is not okay. Everyone has bad hours, and bad days (hey, maybe even bad years!) but we need to realize that we get to choose the way we respond. Be gentle with yourself, but also loving enough to nudge yourself forward into a brighter, calmer space.

Responsibilities

We are all familiar with the pull. We want to curl up with the amazing book we are reading, but it’s time to start dinner. We want to do yoga, but the toilets need to be cleaned. We want to work on that book idea that consumes our thoughts, but it’s Monday afternoon and time for our daughter’s gymnastics class. Work on that oil painting or do laundry? Putter around in the garden with the birds and bees or seal the grout? Play with the dog or pay bills?

Yes, we want to live intentionally, but life gets in the way. Adulting can be a huge roadblock, depending on what season we are in. How many children we have and how old they are. The amount of time and energy our careers suck out of us.

What I realized is that I needed a perspective change. These never-ending chores and responsibilities don’t have to be what prevents me from living with intention; instead, they can be woven into my day. Each responsibility important in its own right. It’s all about how I choose to look at it.

Chores are important because we are keeping our environment clean, our family healthy and our house a pleasant place to live. Our jobs are necessary in order to afford us what we need and get us where we want to end up. So why not make each day an opportunity to excel in what we do and make a difference? We may be in a time of life where our children demand all our time and energy. But we can also see it as a time to enjoy the limited years that we have together under one roof. To try to push back the demands and embrace the gift that is every new day.

Time

When we live with intention, we become the master of how we spend our time.

Time is that precious commodity that we always wish we had more of. We’d like to make our day meaningful by journaling and meditating, but we just don’t have time.

Again, change in perspective, a shift in mindset, is needed. We know that we all have the same number of hours in a day. When we live with intention, we become the master of how we spend our time.

Think about how you spend a typical day (write it down if you really want to become aware). Do you see pockets of time that you spend doing things that don’t really align with your journey to live your best life? Things that aren’t priorities–maybe guilty pleasures–but not priorities. This is not to say that you can’t have any down time or time to be “mindless.” Mindlessness is as important as mindfulness, just in smaller quantities. The areas of my day that I identified as not being a priority included: scrolling through social media, playing a Tetris-like blocks game on my phone, and binge-watching “Modern Family” before bedtime.

I always want to give myself a free pass when I compare my time wasted now with all the time I spent wasted in the past. The social media, games and television are not bad in and of themselves. They are just activities that should have a time limit so they don’t expand into hours of time that could be spent doing something more productive or meaningful.

In Closing…

So the challenge with intentional living is really to bring as much mindfulness, meaning and intention as possible into your daily life. To navigate the roadblocks, accept them for what they are, and turn them into stepping stones to reach our destination.

How do roadblocks become stepping stones? By being aware when our emotions take center stage, knowing that they will come and go, and taking care of ourselves so these feelings don’t derail our day. By changing our perspective so that we see our responsibilities as having significance that can contribute to the meaning in our day and our lives. By allowing ourselves to be mindless and indulge in meaningless pleasures, but limiting the time we spend doing them.

Now that our paths are clear and we can start stepping our way through a more intentional day, what does that look like?

This is what I’ll talk about in my next post.