Guarding Your Energies

One thing that’s been at the top of my mind the past few months is guarding my energies. What I mean by that is choosing carefully how I spend my precious and limited energetic resources. A person only has so much energy… yet there are millions of places where one can spend their energy — especially with the information explosion that is the internet!

There’s so much information out there to read, so many books, so many websites, so many cool avenues to explore. So many possibilities of things to make, do, try out, places to go. It can be frustrating when you can’t learn about and do everything you want to. Such is the dilemma of this modern age! The world is open to us like it never was in the past, but as great as that is, it also means we have to learn to say no to a lot of stuff.

When I was in the depths of illness with hardly any energy at all, I learned to be very careful with how I spent it. I stopped bringing home those free magazines from the health food store (voila – less reading, less clutter!). I cancelled holds on several library books — meaning fewer trips to the library and fewer things in my reading pile. I made sure the stuff in my reading pile was stuff I really wanted to read. I threw away new recipes requiring too much effort or too many new ingredients. I crossed errands off my list for things I didn’t absolutely need. I bought things at the expensive store close to our house, instead of riding a lot further away on my bike just to save a couple dollars at the cheaper store.

Spending my energy more thoughtfully has been an excellent lesson. It’s something I’ll continue to do from now on. With the beginning of a fresh new year, I’ve been feeling inspired to complete projects that I’ve been wanting to do for some time now. And if I’m going to do those projects, I have to make them a priority — which means saying no to other, less important stuff that can so easily fill a day.

So today, I crossed stuff off my to-do list that I decided not to do after all (which is the quickest way to reduce your to-do list, for sure! hehe!).

I went through my email box and unsubscribed from almost all the email lists that I’ve gotten onto over the years.

I called Barnes & Noble for the fifth time, trying to get the last of the fraudulent charges removed from my credit card… (not to bash them, though, because I’ve been really impressed with them and the customer service people have been great, but I think doing refunds is just a bit of a process) but then after being transferred to the wrong department, I hung up and thought “forget it!!” and wrote a check for the remaining money, sealed it up and mailed it off. I figured it would ‘cost’ me less energy to earn the money back than it would to continue to spend time and energy trying to get the refund!

It’s an ongoing process… paring down clutter — physical and otherwise — that creeps into your day and eats up time and energy. I’m actually loving this process right now, because it means I’m actively shaping my life into what I want, and I’m getting rid of extraneous “filler” so that I’ll have more time for the things that really excite me — the things I want to say “YES!!” to. Otherwise I feel overwhelmed with all the stuff in piles that I have to read and deal with. But getting ruthless with incoming clutter and taking the word “No” to a whole new level is paying off. Life begins to feel simpler, with more breathing room. Less stress. More time for things that are truly important to you. More energy to devote to them!

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