The Puzzle is Always Moving
Sporadic progress is still progress
All the self-help gurus and videos and guides telling me how many days to make a habit and that consistency is crucial and I will be rewarded by making myself do the thing sure make me feel inadequate.
Sometimes I get on the self-improvement train for weeks at a time! Eat right, exercise, mental health, relationships, healthy fun, financial discipline, etc, etc. Sometimes I fall off for a day, a week, a month. Sometimes pushing through the universe’s twists and turns is all I have the energy for. And for sure grief can throw a wrench in the best-laid plans.
Time is a forcing function of the universe and The Puzzle abides - pieces get laid down in front of you and you move over them whether you choose them or not. You can take a break from caring and in a few weeks look back and you will see the values and factors of your life that have inertia - that are instilled in your actions without effort. When I take a break from thinking about my life, slide through it, and look back I see mostly things I want - I still care about family, I still want to do fulfilling work, and I’m still conscientious. But there are a lot of things that fall off when my effort falls off - self-care, exercise, diet, planning.
I spend a lot of my time in my bonds with my family. I can also find my flow at work and the whole world disappears - I skip meals and movement and planning and schedules. Both work and family are important to me, but the tension between the things that easily expand and the things that need our effort is where our work lies. If you’re happy with what shows up when you stop paying attention then you’ve got a well-aligned brain map for your Puzzle!
I have been nudged out of my routines recently and I believe it allowed me space for some grief I needed to process. The routines and discipline and self-management just push emotional processing down the road. The gurus might say I should have increased my self-work practice, but I’m at peace with the time off and will tell myself it’s healthy regardless of how different it has been than my normal life.