Recently I participated in a webinar for some continuing
education credit. For several weeks, the notes I took have been sitting on my
desk where I see them daily. At the top of my notes is the sentence: Know Your
Why. The placement of the notes in my field of vision and the fact that
sentence was the first thing I wrote is not the result of any intentionality on
my part, but having that sentence greet me each morning has been a good
reminder to me to use my time well.
Know your why. How often do you find yourself on
autopilot, on a hamster wheel of activity, without any awareness of your why?
To pause and ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” first requires that we pause.
Yet pausing is not something many of us find easy to do.
Years ago, when my children were actually children, we
had a hamster. Harry the hamster was not terribly bright (though when he
escaped from his cage, he was a master at eluding capture). He gave us much
evidence that processing was not something his brain did very well. One way he
showed us his brain capacity was that when he ran on his hamster wheel, he
stuck his head out of the wheel, which meant that every half-revolution, he got
bonked by the bar that ran the diameter of the wheel connecting it to the
wheel’s spoke. He never learned. He never figured out to keep his head in the
wheel.
I think many of us are guilty of the same level of
thinking. We just keep moving, keep running, without any thought to whether
what we are doing addresses our reason for being in the world. We run, getting
burned out, emotionally bonked on the head, without considering that we can
change our behavior.
It is important that we know our why. Knowing our why
enables us to live balanced lives, lives in which we are awake and aware, lives
in what we do fills us with energy, health, and joy rather than making us
irritable, ill, and exhausted.
One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 1. It speaks to
knowing your why. Let me share the first 3 verses with you:
Oh, the joys of those who do not
follow the advice of the wicked,
or stand around with sinners,
or join in with mockers.
But they delight in the law of the Lord,
meditating on it day and night.
They are like trees planted along the riverbank,
bearing fruit each season.
Their leaves never wither,
and they prosper in all they do.
When we don’t get caught up in the fray, when we don’t
simply run on life’s hamster wheel, we are less likely to follow the crowd.
Instead, we root ourselves in our why, and bear fruit. We live lives of meaning
and direction. We know our why.
