Take A Moment To Grasp Life

Where on earth did the time go?!?! We all find ourselves asking this question. It seems like we blink and suddenly we’re a decade older!

With children at home, you can check how much time has passed based on your child’s age. As a non-childbearing female executive, you can go years before picking your head up out of your work to realize, what have you done with your life??

I personally am terrified of growing old, on my death bed, not ready to go. I fear I will not feel complete.

Do you ever look at something spectacular like a waterfall after a 10-mile hike and think, I want to absorb this moment more, I’m not getting as deeply connected as I want to be?

To combat this feeling of “what have I done in my life” and to help myself connect to the moment, I journal. I journal consistently, but not significantly in length. I want to remember my highlights reel. I want to grasp every moment with as much fullness as humanly possible.

I used to journal about my stress so that I wouldn’t be a burden on my husband. In dire times, this can really help! But in non-dire times, I found that it turned into a complaint book. I didn’t want to re-read my complaints in life. I didn’t want to remember every detail of every day. It was giving me a negative outlook on life, realizing how often I had bad days, so I shifted my journaling to focus on positives.

Every day I write a daily positive. It can be small, it can be big, but either way, I need to find something positive that happened throughout the day. Maybe it’s that I’m alive and breathing. Sometimes that’s worth celebrating!

Every week, I write down a few of the significant positives from my dailies to help recall what I did that week.

Every month, I do a larger reflection. My reflections are guided by the Passion Planner, which was recommended by my business mentor, Damon D’Amore. Every month I answer the following questions:

• What was the most memorable part of this past month? Describe it in detail.
• What were the three biggest lessons you’ve learned in this past month?
• Assess your priorities. Are you happy with how you spent your time? If not, what steps can you take this next month to adjust them?
• How are you different between this past month and the month before it?
• What or who are you especially grateful for this past month?
• Name three things you can improve upon this upcoming month? What are concrete actions you can take to work toward these improvements?
• From 1-10, how do you feel overall about this past month?

These questions give me an amazing picture of how I spent my life. Each month I read back a couple of months to see how my answers have changed over time. It gives me a sense of the ebbs and flows of activities and emotions.

At the end of the year I feel like I remember everything I accomplished, all the positive moments and have a clear highlights reel that makes me feel satisfied and in the moment. I cannot recommend the Passion Planner enough.

I mentioned I journal excessively, right? I also do a daily doodle. 365 Doodle. I don’t always get to it every day because, well, time is scarce and drawing is hard, but that’s where I write my daily positives. I go back at least every week to catch up and I draw something related to the day based on my daily positive. By drawing a doodle to represent the day, it gives me a picture book to remember the significant things that happened. Not only am I reading my life highlights but looking at it in illustrative form too.

These books I likely will continue forever because they have been incredible tools to grasp life on the deepest level. They give me comfort to know that it’s ok to get older; that I’ve lived an amazing, adventurous, and full life!