Patrick Dion’s lecture at the Kinsella auditorium on Thursday made me wonder why an ever increasing number of Canadians are struggling with mental health issues.
One reason, I think, is that our world seems to be more about doing more and doing it all at the same time.
An underlying philosophy of quantity over quality saturates everything we do these days, and I believe both individuals and our society as a whole are seeing the cracks in that faulty mantra.
I deliberately don’t buy into it. Or, I should say, I don’t buy into it anymore.
Years ago, I had my own crisis point, of sorts, feeling totally overwhelmed and unable to cope. My salvation was found in a self- help book called, aptly enough, “Being Overwhelmed.”
I don’t remember who wrote it and I don’t remember much of what was written in it. But, what did stuck with me. Whenever I found myself in that overload mode, was the utilization of an extremely practical two stage process.
The exercise starts, first and foremost, by taking the time to consciously decide and write down the one thing that’s most important to you in life. You only get one.
Then, once that larger picture is clarified, and within the context of that one choice, everything else is further prioritized into two simple lists: things you absolutely have to do, and things you absolutely don’t. Again, you have to write it all out. It can’t be done just in your mind.
Remember, the “absolutely have to do” list must be in line with your one fundamentally most important thing in life and not by what someone else is saying you have to do.
It may seem overly simple, but it’s really not that easy. However, if you take the time to do the first two things well, by the time you get to the “absolutely don’t have to do” list you’ll feel completely liberated and that list will become a mile long and you’ll realize what a pile of crap you’ve been wasting your precious time on.
That’s the short term benefit. The long term benefit is that over the course of your changing life, you’ll be totally surprised to realize that the few things that were truly important to you when you were a young adult are pretty much the same things that are truly important to you now that you’re older.
