“It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol.”
Brene Brown
It’s Thursday, nearing mid-July. Book deadlines loom, meetings fill the calendar, the house is a mess, blah blah blah, you get it. And yet, here I sit on the beach, reading a novel in the midst of listening to the sand bugs jump around me and how the waves sound as they wash over the rocks then recede; like an inhale and exhale. I pick up the smoothest, shiniest rock sitting near me and rub my thumb over its smooth surface. It takes active work to silence the shoulds and to allow myself to be present, here with the sun, the waves, the rocks, the bugs, myself.
We have a saying in our house; “Don’t should on me!” Or “Don’t should on yourself!” It’s become such a common practice that we all notice the shoulds in one another and it brings awareness before we change our sentence removing the should from our previous statement.
So for the moment, I silence the shoulds and allow myself the gift of this summer moment; sitting on the beach in the midst of the fullness of life. I’ve been at this life for over four decades now and there hasn’t been one season of it that has felt dull or that I’ve had ample time. There will never come a day where I can wad up my to-do list, throw it in the trash and say “I’ve done it!” There will always be more tasks to complete, more things I could do, more items to add to the list and yet a life lived without moments of sitting on the beach in the middle of the week is not the life I want.