Only this

This week I decided that no, I really do need my Franklin Covey planning back, so I ordered myself a lovely spring green planner with daily pages.

The thing that makes Franklin Covey stuff different from other planners is that it is designed to help you focus on what you really want to do and be. And one of the ways it does that is through a guided series of questions and exercises.

I had never actually sat down and done them all, despite having been a devotee for years. But today I did sit down and work through them — outlining my values; my roles; what I want to do, be, and have; what has worked in my personal and professional life. And two things became abundantly clear.

I really do like my life

While there are lots of things I want to do in my life, they’re all aligned with my life as it is right now. Teach yoga and shiva nata, open a yoga studio for fat girls, sing in a band, become a really great photographer, go on retreat, take lots of classes — these are all things I’m either already working with or which are the next steps for things I’m already working with.

Even more interesting, when I was trying to figure out what I want to have, I couldn’t think of much. Oh, I want the Bungalow (our code for the perfect little house we’ve envisioned), and I want some really good camera equipment, and I want more clothes that feel like me, but really? I couldn’t think of much I want that I don’t already have or have access to.

And that’s really freeing. It reminds me that I can settle back into where I am right now. I can be here. There’s no need to live for some mythical future.

All I want is presence

When I thought about how I could distill everything into a mission statement, a guiding set of principles for my life, I realized that the only important thing, the only thing that mattered at all, was becoming radically present to and expressive of Spirit.

Everything else — my crazy business ideas, my desire to help people — comes out of that. They’re expressions of that central mission. So rather than pushing, pushing, pushing on all of those other things, I need to keep working on presence, keep focusing on my spiritual life, and let all of that unfold as it will.

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop doing the things I’m doing for them all, only that it means that the priority, the thing that cannot be ignored or put off until later, is my spiritual practice. I need to prioritize time for journaling, for inquiry, for talking to monsters, for yoga, for meditation, for art. This is the center of my life. I need to arrange the rest of my life so that its centrality is taken for granted.

That’s a lot of stuff for a Saturday morning

I’m having a lot of wonderment right now, because only this week I’d had a little fit about not being able to handle having this life as it is for three more years (when my lovely wife finishes seminary and things change on a macro level).

But the life I was talking about then, that was the life that had the dayjob at the center, that was surrounded by Work and Effort and Pushing. It’s the same life, but somehow shifting the center makes all the difference.

Now the trick is going to be remembering this when I’m caught up in the trance of Professional Life Is All, which is a serious occupational hazard in this city.