Monday Motivation 9/25/2000

Sometimes, you just have to step back, take a breath, and refill your soul.

We live in a society where life moves at a non-stop, never-ending pace. We constantly have to keep moving, keep changing, keep growing, keep working. Our fathers and mothers might have gathered around the dinner table at nights, just like Leave it to Beaver, but it seems we have to keep moving, like a man on a treadmill. If we stop moving, we're likely to get run over.

So, it gets more and more difficult to take time to replenish ourselves.

September 20th's Wall Street Journal chronicled the numbers of people who work night and day. Couples trade off child care, with one working nights and the other days. Like a friend of mine, they occasionally saw each other in the bathroom when they were brushing their teeth. Her coming to bed, him leaving for work.

In such a life, it is extraordinarily important that we take time to replenish ourselves.

In our physical lives, we live each day by the food we eat and the water we drink. We replenish our bodies with nutrition; sometimes, the food is better than other times, but we still take time to feed our hunger. Even then, when our emotional self hungers, we pretty much ignore it.

When we need personal growth in our career or our family, we often ignore it, too, choosing the path of least resistance, the way that is easiest, even though we don't gain anything from it. We neglect to refresh our skills, learn new things, grow and progress.

Just like a car needs fuel and maintenance, we need learning and growth. We need striving and goal setting. We need to take time once in a while to step back, reevaluate who we are, and decide if we are going in the right direction.

Life is what you make it. It's up to us to make it better, and we will rarely do that if we just persist in keeping our nose to the grindstone. Sometimes, we need to change our direction, and refill our souls to prepare for a glorious future.

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