When I wake up in the morning, ready to start the day, I almost never ask myself, what’s wrong?
Not what’s wrong in my messy room or what’s wrong with the weather today. I mean what’s wrong with ME that I need to be fixing today.
For some, it sounds more like: What am I supposed to be working on today? Or, how can I optimize my life today?
No.
When I’m thinking about what to do today, I literally think, what do I want to do today? Of course, within whatever parameters exist at the moment.
But so often I hear my friends and acquaintances start saying things that sound like they came from a psychology textbook.
It’s like looking for some unrelated boxes to be checked before we get to the fun parts.
What painful memory could be influencing my desire to do something fun?
Why am I suddenly looking around for “permission” to go off on some harebrained adventure?
Are my ideas based on some trauma response?
What about my nervous system?
There are stop and yield signs everywhere, and it’s easy to start applying them to things that might not require stopping at all.
Some of this falls under what’s called healing journey discourse. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But when it becomes the lens for everything, ordinary decisions can start requiring psychological analysis before we make them.
Imagine I pull up and say, come on, let’s go!
But we are not going on a healing journey.
We are going on a field trip!
We’re gonna take in the sights, we’re gonna stop for lunch, we’re gonna explore something new and exciting. But what we NOT finna do is turn this fun day into some blasted emotional homework assignment.
There’s a time and a place for that.
But it’s not here. Not now.
And the real point is: it’s not every single day.
Sometimes liberation can be from the mindset of constant fixing, repairing and healing. Somewhere in all of this, there has to be room for just living.
For pleasure.
For curiosity.
For finding out.
We are sensory beings. We see, hear, taste, smell and feel our way through the world. And those experiences give us information we can’t always get by staying in our heads.
Information like:
Ooooh. I like this.
Absolutely fucking not.
I thought I’d hate this.
Why have I never done this before?
This feels good.
I want more of this.
I thought I wanted that. Turns out I don’t.
Who knew?
You discover a wine you adore because you tasted it.
You find out you love small villages because you went to one.
You find out waterfalls do something to you because you stood near one and heard the water.
These are some of the ways we discover the pleasures that move us. They can’t all be experienced through a book or a YouTube video. Some things have to be experienced in living color.
And the field trip doesn’t have to be some grand excursion we take once every couple of months. It can happen in the middle of an ordinary day.
Sometimes you can be introspective and work on yourself.
And sometimes you need to go outside.
That’s it.
Maybe you’ve been traveling down the healing-journey road, and there is valuable work for you to do there.
But every so often, there’s an exit.
Take it.
See where the road goes.
You don’t need to have arrived anywhere first.
You don’t need permission.
You don’t need to know what the excursion means.
You don’t need to return with a breakthrough.
You don’t need to become a better person while you’re gone.
You are allowed to leave the work unfinished and go live.
