The band “Airbourne” play what my dad and I term “riff rock.” Simple, repetitive, and catchy tunes that get the foot tapping and the head nodding. One of these suggests living life to the full as much as possible while young.
Sometimes we humans push ourselves to the limit. For better or for worse we like to see how far our mental faculties, our physical aptitude, our emotional resilience can take us. We learn when we try new things, and not every new thing we will excel at, so there will be toil and hard work for worthwhile results. Results in these cases will not always refer to doing the thing well but will include learning more about ourselves to better inform our future decisions.
Mondays are tough, especially if the working week begins with something we have to steel our emotional and mental resolve to be able to do. The good news is if our week starts off this way and we get through it, there’s the whole rest of the week to look forward to! My Monday moment is our fortnightly staff meeting in the morning, booked at this time because at present it suits everyone to meet on this day at this time. I sometimes lack sleep over the weekend thinking the false idea “if I don’t go to sleep Monday will not arrive.” In reality all that happens is I get less sleep and wind up feeling more apprehensive about a thing that, on the whole, goes really smoothly.
On some occasions, we will not be up to doing something and we have to put in our apologies and say no. This is hard. It can feel like letting people down when in reality it is us prioritising looking after ourselves. What we need to do is figure out how much is too much for us and acknowledge when it happens. Whether it be too much food, work, intense exercise, time in stressful situations, we must practice saying no when necessary for our own wellbeing.
“Monday” for you might be a Tuesday, or a Saturday, or it might be the start of a ten day run of workdays. Whatever it is, it’s already hard enough without us pushing our own wellbeing down our priority list.
Self care is important, and is not selfishness. To better enable us to look after each other, we must actively practice looking after ourselves too. Working ourselves until we are unable to function is a symptom of a broken world. This we must change and become champions of environments where honest self care is not out of the ordinary.
Look after each other, without forgetting to look after yourself. The mantra at the end of each post I make has this at its heart.
Be good, keep good, and sleep good, dear readers. Peace.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels
Hard lines, heavy times, and handblocks 