LESS Goals

I set way too many goals for March:

Declutter at least one item a day.

Read a daily entry from a devotional book (on top of my usual Bible reading).

Research every day for our trip.

Do yoga every day.

The last one was actually good for my mental health. The rest got a little bit onerous. In and of themselves, they were not bad goals, but together, they all added up to equal more stress. I found myself rushing around a lot of nights after work trying to check off my list of daily goals, so this month, I set less, and I made goals for the month, not the day:

1) Swim two laps at least one a week.

2) Increase my healthy fat intake at least a certain amount (on the way to the goal my running nutritionist set for me).

3) Declutter and donate the big brown box by the end of the month.

I also quit some things:

I quit trying to read and listen to my daily Bible passages. Maybe that is a bad thing, but I did not believe I was getting much more out of listening to the passages than reading them, and trying to get the audio recordings finished each morning delayed my readings of the next passages, so I quit. I did keep up reading my devotional book. I appreciated it for bite-sized theological nuggets. My husband and I also read a daily devotional together in the morning. Maybe it's not "enough," but it's something.

I quit researching for our trip. At this point, I have found more things to do that we will have time to do, and it really is not my trip anyway. It is my husband's.

I quit tracking wind speed and direction in my running log. The Apple fitness app doesn't give it to me, which means I needed to open up the weather app each day to find it. Wind is an interesting stat, but not one I really look at that much. In fact, now that I think of it, I don't often look back at the weather information either. I mostly look back at my paces. Maybe I want to scrap weather tracking all together. That is food for thought for the future.

I told myself I could quit decluttering, but I still had that big, brown box. To be honest, decluttering also felt like either a conviction or a compulsion, maybe both. While I kept doing it, I had to look harder and harder for things to discard or donate. On the flip side, I found myself wanting to buy new and shiny things. Not the point, Sarah!

I kept up with the yoga, but after completing the Amanda Elle (n.d.). playlist through which I was working, I had to look harder for the shorter types of practice I like to do after work. That means yoga, too, started to become work. Good things take time and effort, but I really need to decide which ones are worth my time, and which ones aren't. Isn't that part of the purpose of LESS? To have more time for what matters?

So here I sit at the end of another month. We did donate that box, so we have that many less things in my house. I dropped some goals. I dropped some habits. What's left? What of what's left still matters? That is what I'm still on a quest to find out (with lots of prayers and questioning and discussions with my husband)!

Reference:

Elle, A. (n.d.). 5 minute yoga [Playlist]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGSleEMpW_U&list=PL9EBPDA6SCdYgxjSGj_50ls7utbpQrDUL