Wake Up + Stop Snoozing
Today is Monday. Today is the last Monday in January, and in two days, we'll be into February. 30 days from the New Year goes by rather quickly, doesn't it.
What did you set out to accomplish and attend to at the beginning of this month? Was it to pick back up on a hobby? Re-establish good habits? Spend more time with your friends/family? Cleaning up your act?
Now let me ask this: How are things going with that?
If they're going well, hurray! You're a lil overachiever, aren't ya. Because by this time, more than 75% of us have waned or given up completely on changes we set out to make at the beginning of the year (resolutions- achoo!). After all, life gets busy and things fall by the wayside that aren't of emergent urgency. But what if one day, we wake up and those things are no longer available to us? Would not being able to have or do those things make it feel like you should have prioritized it as urgent earlier?
Life has the sneakiest snooze button of all. We press it all the time on:
Our passions
Our family
Our relationships
Our health
Our personal development
Our emotions
Our career paths
We hit snooze on our passions because we're already braindead at the end of a workday and because curling up with Netflix is easier than chasing the inconvenience of passion projects.
We hit snooze on our family because we think they'll always be around after we're done being "so caught up with work" or starting a family because "there's time for that later after I do my thing and accomplish what I want first."
We hit snooze on our relationships because they require authentic and sometimes straight-up inconvenient effort to nurture and develop them.
We hit snooze on our health because hot bodies can wait and we're not suffering repercussions of neglecting it...yet.
We hit snooze on our personal development because trying to change + admitting our weaknesses and insecurities are really fucking hard and sometimes paralyzingly scary.
We hit snooze on our emotions because grief, sadness, and loneliness are overwhelming and it's much easier to cover those up with anger, denial, distractions, selfies, likes, and swiping right.
We hit snooze on our career paths because it's easier to passively watch it unfold while someone tells us what to do instead of actively creating and crafting it ourselves to our full potential.
We tend to wait to wake up until life slaps us in the face with a reality check that we already missed the boat and there's no snoozes left.
Our chances to chase our passions grow slim because we've let the bigger windows of opportunity fly by, while expecting more would come along.
Time with our families vanish because sickness, death, relocation, and not making amends.
Our relationships crumble because we didn't put the effort in to maintain it while it was good, and waited until it fell apart to try to desperately resuscitate it when it was too late.
Friends, lovers, and family start to grow distant because we avoided dealing with our personal obstacles and never grew up.
Our hopes for personal fulfillment and contentment in life become unattainable because we didn't deal with our emotions before the clay hardened into cement, making us stuck.
Our potential doesn't get achieved and we see people surpass us at work that maybe didn't have as much promise as you, because you thought you could rely on your talent alone.
STOP SNOOZING🙅🏻Your life is now.
We jolt awake then, and think "why did I snooze this whole time?! Now it's too late!"
Who you are today is very likely be who you are tomorrow. Now is the time we lay the groundwork for the tomorrows and our futures. Wake up, so that you can enjoy the fullness of all these experiences while things are still going your way, rather than glossing through it all, only to wake up to it all being gone because you coasted through without real intention and mindfulness.
The time to wake up is now. No tomorrows are promised to you unless you wake up and create them.
