So many times when I speak with people about choosing themselves, living their best life, achieving their dreams, blah-de-blah-de-blah, I see the reaction “I don’t know how I’m going to squeeze that in with everything else I HAVE to do.” From there I try to determine if that’s just a knee jerk reaction because they haven’t thought of prioritizing the win/win scenario of living their best so they have the best to offer others or if they really feel that the life they’ve created for themselves is a law of physics like gravity, a black hole they are headed to which they can’t escape.
If it’s the former, then I work to help them understand the wisdom of the airline stewardess please save yourself first because you’re no good to anyone if you’re dead. Once people start to see that this is true, that emptying themselves, sacrificing themselves, and putting themselves last robs everyone of their presence and uniqueness, robs us of a role model and a support on our own paths, then things start to change for the better. If it’s the latter, the message has to go another way. Because as much as people feel trapped by circumstances, by a lack of money, by bills, by career necessities, by family responsibilities, we aren’t. We are choice making machines that are constantly voting with our actions in each moment to stay where and who we are or to change. Change happens regardless because everything around us is changing and that affects change in us. Linear time is something we live in that effects our bodies whether we like it or not.
So we choose in each day to use our circumstances to hold off change, to keep locked in 
one form, to keep us from recognizing the change as it occurs, the adult equivalent of putting our fingers in our ears and singing “lalalalalalalalalala” so we block everything out or we don’t. The life we have created for ourselves from the time we became adult is not physics, it’s an art project. We created it out of the materials at hand and with the skills we have acquired in each moment. It’s up to us what it comes out to be. And it’s constantly evolving even if that evolution is to remain forcibly stagnant.
So focusing on ourselves may feel like just one more thing to add into our day, something that needs to be squeezed in to a day already full. But it isn’t. Not really. It’s the one thing we’re squeezing out as hard as we can, leaning against the door as it tries to force itself back in and to be relevant again. Think of all that energy expended to prevent the one thing we claim we most want? What can we become if we stop and open the door?
