How is it so easy to find yourself stuck helplessly in a rut of life? One day you wake up, drive to work, do the same things you’ve been doing everyday for what seems like an eternity and you wonder, “How the hell did this happen”? Is this really what the rest of my life is going to be, because if waiting in the line at the Starbuck’s drive-thru on my way to work is the highlight of my day, then something’s gone seriously wrong.

This epiphany… this light bulb… It’s what spurs us to make changes when we’ve become too complacent to make them on a conscious level. And you can’t blame yourself. Everyone gets stuck in the same machine. The cog just keeps on turning and so you just keep on keepin’ on without realizing that your life has become blurry. You go to work. You come home. You watch some TV, surf the web (ahhhh… the good ‘ol decompression chamber). The weekends are filled with yard work, football, “malling” for more stuff that you don’t need and it’s all highlighted by the after-dinner Cinnabon. Why does this happen to so many people? Here’s what I think.

I think that life has become so complicated that we are constantly rushing in our lives and in our minds trying to deal with all the balls we are juggling. I think that life is just too busy, too fast to ever sit and just breathe for a moment. If we make it home from work and can sit and decompress for an hour or two, then we’re doin’ something right. We’ve survived another day… or so we think. There’s no opportunity to stop and think about whether this path is the right one, or if it’s gone off-course. We all work so hard just to stay on top of everything that we zoom right by without even realizing that we’ve missed the point entirely. What’s the point of juggling all those balls? Is it just to juggle them, or was there a reason… a goal? Do you remember the reason or have you just been juggling them because it’s what you did yesterday and you survived yesterday?

I always pick on retirees who have finally reached the point in their lives where they are free to do whatever they want, and all they do is sit at home and go to Costco! Well, now I know why. There so god damn tired of juggling all those balls for the past 30 years that simplicity is in itself the freedom they have been waiting for. Simplicity. What is that?

Making change in your life is a good thing. Yeah… I know that often times you change one thing and suddenly you’ve fractured the solid, placid ground you were standing on. You find yourself in danger of dropping the ball… all of them. Well, guess what? If you drop them all the sky will not fall; your world will not stop. You can sit down and calmly and peacefully examine each and every one of them and decide whether it is worth picking them back up. You can evaluate all the aspects of your life and decide which ones fulfill you and which ones drain you. I suggest that you take the ones that are draining you and you get rid of them as fast as humanly possible. Once you have less to manage, the sky will open up and you’ll begin to see what you may have been missing.

So, I dare you to redefine your life and get rid of the blur. Wake up from your rut and consider where it’s taking you. Reestablish your goals; be certain that there is a reason for all of those balls that you’re juggling. A reason beyond the fear of what will happen if you drop it, that is. And, if it is in fact taking you to exactly where you want to be and everything in your life is fulfilling you then you my friend are my hero! No, my Goddess!

Here are some ideas for making some changes that will inevitably lead to other changes… good ones.

• Wake up early. Whatever time you typically leave the house to go to work, get up an hour and half earlier and take your time. Go sit on your back porch, write in a journal… do something relaxing and let it soak in.
• Say goodbye to your old standby. What is your current decompression tool? TV? Internet? Ditch it… for an hour, for a day, forever. Ditch it long enough to open a door to something new.
• Instead of the mall, get in your car and drive. Don’t have a plan. Don’t have a direction. Just drive and see where you end up. I do this often, and once and I ended up in South Park. The real South Park (Yep, it’s actually a real place).
• Do something you’ve never done before. Force yourself outside of your comfort zone. Go to a rock climbing gym, go skydiving, go race a go-kart (sorry, I’m an adrenaline junkie so that’s where my mind goes). Just being submerged in a different “culture” of people will enlighten you. Skydiving changed my life forever because it awakened me.
• Rough it. Turn off all your electronics for a weekend. Pretend you’re in cabin in the mountains in the middle of nowhere (or preferably, if you can afford it, actually go to a cabin in the middle of nowhere!) and force yourself to live without all our technological dependencies. Once you’ve completed withdrawal and the shakes are gone, you’ll be amazed at how much you’ll see and hear and smell that just wasn’t there before.

Well, that’s all I got… for now. It’s late and I gotta get up in the morning and drive to work… hopefully with a few less balls to juggle.

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