Know Your Why

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.

Living With Intention

I have a magnet on my refrigerator with several statements that challenge me. I bought it at a time in my life when I was emotionally fragile. It encouraged me, and, a number of years later, continues to motivate me to take risks and grow.

 The very first statement on it is “Live with intention.” I’ve been thinking about that frequently, especially as life shifts yet again with the pandemic. Last year, when everything shut down, I committed to use the time as “Covid Retreat,” reflecting on what matters in my life, and what I really didn’t miss. Now, as more and more activities come back on line, the challenge for me is to be intentional about what I add back.

 I’m not alone in this. Just this week I had a parking lot conversation with a friend who was telling me all the meetings she had already attended this week (it was Tuesday) and the reason I was seeing her then was she was heading to another meeting. Yet she also talked about how much she and her husband had enjoyed last spring’s shutdown, where she could have unscheduled time guilt-free.

 Why do we have to feel guilty about having unscheduled time? I struggle with this too. And it’s why I’m particularly focused on that statement “Live with intention.” I don’t want to simply jump back into the fray of busyness because I can. Like falling in a rushing river, once I allow myself to get caught up in the flow of busyness, it’s hard to extract myself.

 To live with intention says to me that I need to be conscious about what I am doing and why I am doing it. I’m reading a book right now entitled, The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World. Though its focus is about our reliance (or maybe better said, our overreliance) on smartphones and the internet, it is causing me to think about overall balance in my life.

 At the end of the day, (in the literal sense) I want to be able to look back at how I spent my day and know what I did and why I did it. This is living with intention.

 How are you handling the increasing availability of pre-pandemic activities? Are you being intentional about what you resume? Maybe it’s a good time to consider what are the activities that truly matter to you and what is simply filler—not necessarily bad, but also not purposeful for your life and health.

 Thoreau said, “Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” Choosing to live with intention then, makes us truly rich.

Something to Live For

Our life. . . provokes us with the evidence that it must have meaning. . . our purpose in life is to discover this meaning, and live according to it. We have, therefore, something to live for. The process of living, of growing up, and becoming a person, is precisely the gradually increasing awareness of what that something is.                                                                                            

                                                                                                    Thomas Merton

 Something to live for. I wonder how that something changes for us over time. How often do we consciously think about it in our daily round of life? Maybe the phrase only pops into our consciousness when we are shaken awake by some struggle.

 Or maybe it is a gradually increasing awareness, as Merton says, that happens in the ordinariness of life. We might think about what it is we live for from time to time—as we turn the calendar page to a new year, as we approach a milestone birthday, or when we experience a sense of restlessness with life as it currently is for us. We may wonder what it is that we are living for at such times. If we do think about what we are living for, then a follow up question is called for: What am I doing that moves me toward meaning in my life?

 It is easy to be distracted from questions about meaning and what we live for by the thrum of daily news, activities, and a thousand (or even ten) requests for assistance—good things, but must we say yes to every one of them? We are moving, always moving, it seems, but toward what goal? We have filled the hours of yet another day, but with what? At the end of the day, in the purely literal meaning of that phrase, are we any closer to awareness of what we are living for, or moving toward meaning?

 Stephen Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, speaks of getting caught up in “the thick of thin things.” As Lent approaches, I encourage you to walk with Jesus through this season, to see how he was aware of the meaning of his life, and how he lived according to it. He had something to live for, and he did. To reflect on the purposefulness with which he approached life can move us to clear away the clutter of “thin things” and focus on what it is that gives our lives meaning. What is it that you are living for?