Does Anyone Else Feel Like the End of the Year Took Steroids?

What if the year doesn’t need a dramatic finish?

This last stretch arrives and suddenly the tempo jumps. The final three months hit and it feels as if we are all sprinting. Towards what exactly? Will flipping the last digit of the calendar really prove life is a race? For most of the year we pace ourselves like marathon runners. Then somehow the marathon turns into a sprint. I definitely missed the memo.

And it is not just me. It is my clients, my friends, my family. Everyone seems caught in the same rush. Are we running toward finishing things on time, closing Q4, preparing Q1, Christmas, New Year’s Eve? These moments will come whether we sprint or stroll.

Right now I am juggling twenty things at once. You are probably juggling even more. Our culture celebrates multitasking as if it is a badge of honor. Someone convinced us we can do twenty things simultaneously. Maybe we can. Maybe we simply sweat, burn out, forget meals, skip movement, and pop vitamin D because we do not have twenty minutes of sunlight to spare. It feels like a tiger is always behind us, and it gets closer as the year ends.

What if we gave ourselves ten minutes a day of full calm, with nothing interrupting us. Not Netflix calm. Not scrolling calm. Actual NOTHING.

What if we stopped treating life the way we treat our phones, scroll scroll scroll. Life is happening and we are missing the beauty and the messiness of it because we are always running. Maybe walking more would help.

This week I chose to stop for a moment and notice the rise of my daughter’s kite, because I never had a kite while growing up and it felt like the kind of small joy worth noticing. It's like I was a kid again.

Life expands when we do that and the tiger doesn’t feel that close anymore.

PS: My refreshed website is almooooost done, but the twenty things keep popping. I will try to have it ready by the end of Q4, and if not, just know I chose Christmas over it.