You get to the end of a busy week. Work done. Shopping sorted. A few messages finally answered. You might even have made it to the gym and remembered to put the bins out.
A respectable effort.
Then someone asks about the thing you’ve been meaning to do. Look into that course. Plan the trip. Have a conversation about what comes next.
“Yeah, I still need to get around to that.”
It brings me back to a question I’ve been sitting with:
Are you more focused on managing the life you have or creating the life you want?
A short question with a long answer.
There’s a bit of both
My first answer is probably the same as yours: both.
There are commitments to honour, bills to pay and people who need us. There are also plenty of good things worth looking after. A relationship you value. Friendships that make your week better. Work you care about.
Giving those things attention is part of creating a life you enjoy too.
The difficulty is that keeping everything going can take up all the space available. You can be doing plenty of worthwhile things while something else that matters to you keeps waiting for a quieter week.
And when that week arrives, there’s usually something else to sort out.
The intention is there
Leaving the Rabbitohs to focus on ACE brought this question closer to home for me. I wanted to give ACE more of my attention, and deciding to leave meant weighing up the financial implications alongside what I wanted to move towards.
Having the intention didn’t make the decision straightforward. There were pros and cons, and plenty of questioning myself.
That’s the friction I’m interested in here. We can want something and still find it difficult to give it space. Especially when doing so asks us to change something familiar, have an uncomfortable conversation or begin before we feel completely ready.
Sometimes there really isn’t much room. Money, energy, health and responsibilities affect what’s possible. The question is what room we do have, and whether we’re choosing how to use it.
What would “slightly different” look like?
Creating the life you want sounds enormous. It can make a fairly ordinary next step feel like it needs a five-year plan behind it.
But say you want to feel more connected to your friends. You’ve been thinking about it for weeks, liking the photos and meaning to organise something. Giving that intention some space might mean sending a message with an actual day in it.
Or perhaps you’re curious about a different kind of work. You don’t have to resign on Monday. You could ask someone in that field for a coffee and find out what their ordinary working week looks like.
Neither guarantees an outcome. Both give you something to work with beyond “I must get around to that.”
Have a look at the week ahead. What’s one thing you keep saying matters to you that has no space in it yet?
Choose one step and decide when you’ll take it. Make it small enough to fit the life you actually have, and meaningful enough to move something forward.
You may already have more of the life you want than you give yourself credit for. Look after that too.
And give something you’re looking forward to a little space in this week.
If you’d value a conversation about what you want next and how to make room for it, get in touch with ACE. We can start with what matters to you and work out a next step that fits.