Welcome back to "The 7 rules of Life" mini-series. I would like to start by apologizing to all of you out there following the blog, encouraging me, reading these articles and using them as a way to inspire yourself to find your own way. I have been
absent from the platform
because of certain situations that demanded my full focus and attention. Although I am not currently back full time to my blogging schedule
(every 2 weeks; post is up on Mondays) I will do my best to post some articles
and keep you in the loop. The blog is still here, I am still here; I just took a step back, a break to evaluate things, situations and life more clearly and it was a much needed thing in a world where people don't seem to ever stop.
We live in a world where the demand and the pressure is so
high that we sometimes forget how important it is to just stop for a minute. We
underrate the value of a step back because we are used to idea that we have to
constantly be moving forward. And what happens is that we get burned out, we
get exhausted. In between meeting the demands of the people surrounding us,
behaving like we are superhuman, trying to make everybody happy, there is truly
no time or energy left to evaluate what we want and what makes US happy.
These past couples of days have came with their share of toughness and challenging situations to deal with. As a response to life giving me lemons, I thought there was only one thing to do: keep moving forward no matter how hard it was. Which I did but soon, I reached a point where I was just emotionally exhausted, I was burned out and I couldn’t pick myself up anymore. I felt like I was trapped in some kind of vicious circle where the more I was trying to push and move forward, the harder it was for me to get my head out of the water. It is when I decided that I needed a break. So I took one: I disconnected myself from everything and took some time to evaluate my life. I took a step back to think about what I had gone through, what my life was like at the moment and what I wanted to do next. But most importantly I took time to reconnect with myself.
I got to a point where I couldn’t move forward because there
were too many things I just pushed to the side pretending they didn’t exist in
hope that it would make my life easier. But it did not: it only made things
worse. Being stuck and having such a hard time getting my head out of the water
made me understand that before I could deal with the challenging situations
ahead of me, the sadness, the frustrations, the brokenness, the emptiness, the
tears and the chaos, I had to heal first. I had to get to the core of myself
and find the root of the problem to fix it instead of treating the symptoms. I had
to reconnect with myself, fix myself, and heal myself before attempting anything
else. It was something vital. Taking a step back was an opportunity for me
to be in touch with myself, a moment to evaluate who I was, where I was
going and what I really wanted and needed, what was best for me.
It was a really enlightening moment where I got to learn a
lot more about myself than I thought I knew. It gave me a chance to look back and
appreciate what I had accomplished, who I had become. I learned to spend time
with myself, to nurture myself, to grow, to explore new routes and avenues the
noise of the world around me prevented me to. It allowed me to also map out the changes I wanted to incorporate in my life not to make people happy, not to
satisfy their demands and expectations, but first to make myself happy, second to
create the life I have always dreamed of, and last, to be the person I have
always wanted to be.
You can’t deal with life if you are broken and sometimes the
best way to move forward is to take a step back. It is essential to disconnect
with everything else around you and reconnect with yourself if you want to keep
moving forward and get to the place you are meant to be at. It’s a moment where
you get to define your true self, a moment where you mute everything else
around you and tune into yourself to create peace, happiness and healing from within
because like Trent Shelton always says “It all starts with you”
