A job well done. It makes you feel good… makes you feel accomplished… as if you fulfilled whatever “purpose” you were supposed to fulfill today. I have been thinking about this concept throughout the week as I continue the new gig and find that my days disappear in a flash even though they should be dragging… given the early start. Around 7pm when I get in from my evening work out and look back on the day… I have realized that I am experiencing a feeling that I had been seriously lacking before coming in here… a feeling of accomplishing a task and looking forward to doing it again tomorrow.
Now… I know this sounds ridiculous but unfortunately… it is true. I spent so much time in my “real” life prior to coming in here playing “run around aimlessly” in every part of my existence (outside of my boys) because of the fabricated life that I had forced myself to believe was reality. I was constantly making myself “busy” day in and day out… running from this place to that place without any real purpose for doing what I was doing past the fact that I needed to “productively” pass the time because if I allowed myself to slow down at all… the reality of the life that I created would come crashing down on me… which was a big no go. I think many of us out there do this sort of run around game in our lives for whatever reason personally fits for you. We may be unhappy at home so we try to find ways to stay out and end up hanging out at bars or creating other bad habits solely because we don’t want to face the reality of our problems that wait for us. We may feel unfilled at work so instead of spending the 8+ hours a day actually advancing our career and making a positive impact… we are on social media or shopping on amazon… essentially wasting our lives away until we can punch the clock and head home… only to come back tomorrow and do the same thing.
It has been eye opening how positively I have been affected by waking up early… doing the best that I can at work… and how this start to my day propels everything outside of my actual job as well. I want to work out… I want to read… I want to write… I want to have interesting conversations… I want to call my boys and loved ones and then I want to go the F to sleep because I am tired as hell but pumped to do it all over again tomorrow. And in a massive turn of events… I actually sleep through the night as well (this is also due to the mental war that I was fighting finally coming to a close). This sense of accomplishment bleeds over into every facet of our lives… this act of taking on everyday (and sometimes seemingly mundane) tasks and doing them with a sense of pride… doing them to the best of our ability makes us want to tackle all of our lives with that same gusto.
Just take a day like today… it is Saturday… I woke up at 3:45am to go to work in the kitchen of a prison… I show up and make biscuits and then proceed to learn how to sanitize every counter top, appliance and storage area of our work space… and I leave feeling fantastic. It is hilariously ridiculous. If you had told me that this would be my life a few years ago… I would have thought you were insane but there is such a massive lesson to be learned by all of this… no matter what the task is… no matter how trivial or “below you” we may think that X job or chore may be… by showing up and showing out… by taking pride in the fact that we did the best we could… we can find genuine joy in these tasks and that’s the goal… right? The goal is to find fulfillment in our days… find joy in our lives… maybe it is just as easy as that…
Stay Healthy. Stay Active. Make Someone Smile. Go Sanitize your kitchen appliances… they are probably dirty.