Surviving to Thriving
It was New Year's Eve 2018, and I was standing at our kitchen door looking outside as our kids played in the yard. I’d spent the majority of the last month comatose, hiding under the covers on my bed. I didn’t have a word for what I was experiencing. It would be months before I would know to define it as caregiver burnout. But that didn’t matter in the moment. What mattered was this overwhelming feeling that the life we were living simply wasn’t sustainable.
A thought dropped into my head. But, if I’m honest, it felt more like it came from my soul. Before I lost it, I said out loud, “We’ve been asking the question, ‘How do we survive this?’ What if the question that we’re supposed to be asking is, ‘How do we thrive here?’”
I remember this moment as if it were yesterday. This question has never left the top of my mind. In every hard season, it hovers right under the surface. The moment I realize that we’re simply surviving through a season, I start to consider the alternative… what would it look like to thrive here? What would it take?
Some seasons, the answer is easy. Off the top of my head, intentional fun is always involved. Beauty is always involved. Simplicity is a component. What that looks like can be different… but those three components are always part of my answer.
Before I go a step further, don’t overthink this. Intentional fun could look like a spontaneous “heck yes!” to a trip to Boston because of an Instagram announcement. Absolutely. But it can also look like playing hooky one day and doing only your favorite things. Or watching comedians on Netflix. Beauty can look like a whole lot of things, but the easiest thing for me is to intentionally buy flowers or make sure I stop to watch the sunset. Simplicity is an immediate stop of all extraneous activities, but it’s also clearing space visually. (For me, visual simplicity ranks HIGH on the list of mental health.) This is often as simple as making my bed first thing in the morning.
It really can be that simple.
If nothing about your current situation was ever going to change. If the hard parts stay the same for the rest of your life, or the rest of the time that a particular child is in your home… what do you need to shift from survival to thriving?
Take a moment.
$10 says that your nervous system will tell you pretty quickly. What do you need? Sunshine? Water? 15 minutes every day that belongs to you and you alone?
What do you need?
You’re not meant to just survive this life… what a disservice that would be to the human existence. You were meant to THRIVE.
What would that look like?