What's The Best Thing That Can Happen?
August 5, 2008 by Akemi · 26 Comments
The empty time can be the most productive time
Happy August! I guess many of you are enjoying your vacation – especially those of you who work the corporate jobs. It’s a special time away from your busy daily life. Are you going away? Staying home to relax?
The vacation time is one of the most productive time. And I don’t mean “recharging” your battery. I say this because many of us are so busy doing what we are used to be doing, things we think we need to do because we always did them. We seldom take time to assess ourselves and our tasks. This keeps us busy, but it doesn’t necessarily make us productive.
By putting yourself away from your daily routine during the vacation, you have the opportunity to detach and review yourself. Is what you are doing something that you enjoy doing? Or is it a step to the goal you are heading to achieve?
We are always growing. Is your routine up to date to the current YOU?
The biggest waste of time is not watching a movie, not chatting with your friends, not even taking a nap. It’s living the life of someone else. Say, you have an executive position with a well-known company. You work hard, make great achievements, and get promoted. To the people looking at you, this may seem to be a wonderful life, and you are certainly productive. But if the true you is dying to express your artistic creativity, do all the busy work and consequent achievements even matter?
Perhaps the high social status was something you really wanted when you were younger. So you got your business degree and started working in suits. It worked well before – you had your wins, you learned how much you could do, all so exciting. Somewhere along the way, however, there was an internal change . . . a subtle, but real change. You grew out of that version of YOU.
Here are your choices:
1. Ignore the new YOU growing from within and stick to the YOU you and your friends and family knew.
2. Notice the new YOU and try halting its growth. Overloading yourself with busy work may work for this. Temporarily.
3. Notice the new YOU, notice it is growing, but . . . hey, what can you do? Everything is set up already for the old YOU.
4. Accept the new YOU and change your life to fit to the new YOU.
The paradox of nothingness
Is it scary to change your life to fit to the new YOU you are becoming? Do you hate the newness?
So here is your vacation. You are away from your daily routine anyway. Now don’t do anything. Really. Experience how nothingness feels.
Wherever you are spending your vacation time, embrace nothingness as much as possible. Don’t read. Don’t work on your to-do-list. Hey, you can even plug off your computer and not check the internet for the time being.
When you are completely rested and cleared, do one thing you want to do. Not something you feel you have to do. You are still in vacation, do something that is meaningful to you. The one thing that came out of this nothingness.
There. Now you are truly productive. That is the paradox of nothingness – by letting go of things, you discover the most valuable.
The question “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” is overused these days.
I’d rather ask, “What’s The Best Thing That Can Happen?”
That was what I did a year ago . . . after the summer, I quit my fulltime job and moved myself across America from Tennessee to Oregon. I’m so happy I made that change.
And I keep growing. There is always new ME forming from within, in the bubble. At this time, I don’t know what my new ME would want in life, I just hope I have the courage to follow her growth.
Bonus clue to your growth: Growth doesn’t always come in linear manner, and we don’t always have to “work” to receive something. My last week’s post was about a mini example of how the Universe provides in surprising ways. Further, I see in my business that new clients seem to show up in very timely manner.
Have you reinvented yourself before?
