Why Bother Swimming Upstream?
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” GK Chesterton
On any given day my temptation is to pick up my feet and "go with the flow." Does that sound familiar to you?
There's something refreshing about being in sync with the current; it's comfortable and relaxing. More important, following the current is what everyone ELSE is doing, so the company is amazing.
Fill the calendar with meetings. Write witty tweets. Connect with Facebook friends. Read. Comment. Repeat. Find the remote and watch a little something.
There's nothing necessarily bad in the current. Still, when I pick up my feet and drift, I end up in the land of ordinary.
How dull! How utterly predictable. Still, it's easy and feels nice.
The problem is EXTRAordinary requires EXTRA.
Extra time. Extra energy. Extra focus. Extra money. Extra everything...
On many days, the thought of extra wears me out.
Think about a few of the areas where life should be remarkable:
Marriage Friendship Faith Parenting Health
These are all deserving of my added energy. And yet, sometimes my "extra" goes to keeping the house clean and the in-box manageable. It goes to being current on the news and organized with my spices (don't judge). My extras aren't always strategically deployed.
Just now my son asked if he could tell me something.
"Give me a few minutes, I'm writing."
What?
Apparently I can't make good choices when I'm writing about swimming against the current. (In this case, the current is "me first.")
I just stopped and asked him about the story and his response was, "Oh. I forgot."
If I could change one thing about myself instantly, it would be to live life where I consistently apply my "extra" to the important rather than the urgent.
Are you fighting the current?