Dumping Out the Bucket

All that weight of the world you are carrying around...wouldn't it feel great to put some of it down? 

Transcript

Speaker 00: 0:00

Do you ever think it would feel really great to slow your life down a little bit? Welcome to the Joy fulicity Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Wakefield. P Many years ago, I attended an inspirational presentation where the speaker used a powerful visual to highlight his message. He filled a large bucket up with rocks to the brim, and then he asked the audience, is this bucket full? Well, we said it was. It was filled to the brim. So he proceeded to pull out a bag of sand, and he poured the sand into the bucket over the rocks, filling in all those spaces in between. And he asked us again, is this bucket full? Well, we answered that now, of course, it definitely was full. He walked over and he filled up a pitcher of water. And as you can guess, he added the water to the bucket and it soaked all into the nooks and the crannies of the sand and the rocks, and he then pronounced the bucket to be finally full. Now, I've seen this presentation repeated a few times since, but at different times in my life, it's taught me very different lessons.

Speaker 00: 1:20

In my 20s and early 30s, I viewed this as a demonstration of the power of multitasking and hard work. Those were my building years. Everything was about growing and changing and achieving. I was having babies and getting a degree, remodeling homes, creating a nest egg, and basically wearing myself out, generally speaking. It was tiring, but also really fun and exciting. I wanted to push myself to my limits so I would know where they were. The rocks and sand and water were proof to me that if I moved fast and efficiently enough, there was always a little bit more that I could fit into my day and my life. No excuses. Go, go, go. Not quite full yet.

Speaker 00: 2:07

Well, by my late 30s and 40s, I was feeling the effects of this. I was a multitasking genius by this time indeed, but I was beginning to realize that doing too many things at once made it awfully hard to do any of them very well. I was managing a household, carpooling nine kids for hours daily, managing rental properties, keeping up with a busy career, serving in the community, and taking care of everybody. Except myself. Somewhere along the line, I had stopped having any personal hobbies or quiet time. Exercise? Sleep and eat right? No way! There simply wasn't time. I was like a juggler scrambling to keep from dropping a ball. I managed fairly well overall, but the stress was a heavy load to carry and burnout was looming on the horizon when I saw the rocks and sand and water illustration again. This time, I gleaned a totally different message from it. This time, I clearly saw that while it was possible to fit in all three elements into the bucket, it only worked if you put in the larger rocks first. If you reversed the order and tried to go water, sand, rocks, the rocks would never fit. I realized that I was trying to put my big rocks of self-care, spirituality, and relationship growth in after dealing with the small sand and water stuff. The daily details of life always feel so urgent and pressing. The errands, the meetings, the demands, they never seem to end. And the truth is, they never will. And they will take as much of you as you allow them to, and they will fill as much time as you allot them. Looking back on those days, I wish I would have understood sooner that many of life's most important events will never make it onto the calendar. They're not urgent in the sense of some of the smaller things, but they're more important overall, if that makes sense. And if you aren't careful, you can end up missing them all together. There will never be enough time left to nurture a relationship after all the details, so you have to put that first. I did make some worthwhile changes, and I was doing all good things, mind you, just not always with the right emphasis.

Speaker 00: 4:33

Now I'm in my 50s, looking back on those days, and when I ponder again on the bucket stuffed full of rocks and sand and water, all I really think about now is how heavy that darn bucket is and how freeing it would feel to just dump it out altogether. Maybe not entirely. There's some great stuff in there that I wouldn't want to lose. I still have a full house of people I love and clients that deserve my time and attention. Those rocks can stay, but age and life experience are teaching me that so much of the other weight that I've been dragging around with me just isn't necessary at all. I'd rather take a day at the beach, kick off my shoes, and pour about half of those rocks, sand, and water out and let the waves just take them on away. Maybe find some pretty new shells to put back in, but only if I truly love them and they bring me joy. I don't know that I want the bucket filled all the way to the top at all. I want to leave some space for peace, for reading, for travel, for walks in nature, for long talks with my friends and my family, for listening to the rain on the roof while drinking chamomile tea. Even space for doing absolutely nothing sometimes.

Speaker 00: 5:56

If there's one lesson that I could impart back to my younger self it's to take life a little bit slower. To start with the things that matter most and fit all the other details in around that. So rather than try to fit your family in around your career, how about evaluating the needs of your family and selecting a career that accommodates that? And we want to say, "oh, I can't. I can't possibly." Yeah. Yeah. You know what? You can. And you should. Now, I'm not about to tell any individual person what choices they ought to individually make. So my point isn't about that. My point is to just take a look at the things you're carrying around in your life, all of the stuff, how much of it really matters to you. Like if you look around your house, I'm looking around my closet right now because I record this podcast in my closet, but about half of this stuff I probably could do without. And without a lot of the stuff in your closet or in your house, maybe you could even do with a smaller house. I'm not saying that you have to, but if that's something that would free up money and peace in your life, really take a hard look at it because you are working to support and manage all of the stuff that you own. Once you own it in a very real way, it begins to own you. So the importance isn't about the amount, how much you have. It's about the quality of what you have and are the things that you work so hard to accumulate, to maintain, are they even things that you care about at all?

Speaker 00: 7:45

And this goes for activities too. There was a popular public speaker. Her name was Linda Eyre, and she spoke a lot about parenting. And I heard her one time speak in a conference that I was attending, and she told this story about how she was this frazzled young mother. I think she had, I forget how many children, but a big family like mine, maybe seven, eight, nine children. And she was frazzled all the time, dragging them back and forth to all of their activities and the sporting events and the school things and all of this stuff. And there was this one day that she was just beside herself. There was a soccer game or something that her kids had to be at and they couldn't find the shoes and they were here and they were there. And her kids were pretty little, I think. They were young children, but all of her stress was up and she was kind of, you know, hollering at everybody to hurry up and find the shoes and do this, do this, do this. And feeling all of this weight. And she saw, I think it was her son. Forgive me if I'm butchering this story, but it's something along these lines, sitting on the stairs, kind of with tears going down his face. And she said, "what's the matter? We're on our way to soccer." And her little one looked at her and said, "Mom, I don't even like soccer." And it was a real eye-opening moment for her that she was adopting all of this stress because other moms were taking their kids to soccer, not because her son loved soccer, but because that was a thing that the good moms did. And I think she dropped off from doing that at that point and freed up so much time and peace in their lives by doing that. There's nothing wrong with soccer, by the way. That's not the point. Some kids love it and thrive from it and learn from it and grow. In those cases, it might be worth all of the time and money and attention to get those kids to those games. But it's important to find out first before we dive wholeheartedly into something just because all the other moms are doing it or all the other people at work are doing it or successful people on Instagram are doing it or whatever we're using to measure ourselves by, that, does it matter to us? Because there's all these external places that we look to for validation of who we ought to be and how we ought to think, what we ought to be reaching for, where we should be at different ages of our lives. And the truth is, all of it is imaginary. All of those things might be actually really working for those people, but they don't suit our temperament and our family dynamic at all. So we shouldn't adopt them, even if they're really good things in that case. Or to be honest, a lot of those people might be equally as unhappy chasing after some of that, even though they don't show it on social media. So be really careful about measuring our shoulds against somebody else's shoulds in terms of the kind of life that we're trying to build.

Speaker 00: 10:40

Dump out the bucket. first and foremost, from expectations, especially from external places, because they don't matter. And when we build somebody else's life, we shouldn't be entirely surprised if we don't feel comfortable and happy in it. So that's my message today in this podcast is to really take stock of the ways that we're spending our money, the ways that we're spending our time. the ways that we're spending our talents and our energy and our emotions. And are they serving us? Or have they just become a really heavy weight that we're carrying around with us when something else might serve us better?

Speaker 00: 11:30

The funny thing is, most of the time when we're saying, "oh, this is such hard work and I hate it," it's not because we don't like hard work. Most people find hard work very stimulating and exciting and challenging and wonderful when that hard work is being directed toward something that lights them up, that fills their heart, that they truly feel a passion for. Then it's kind of amazing how hard we're willing to work and we don't feel worn out. We don't feel exhausted. We don't feel stressed out after a day of doing that. Sometimes our bodies might be tired, but our minds and our hearts and our spirits are actually energized by hard work that's directed in our chosen direction, in the things that matter to us. In the things that perhaps are our destiny on this earth. We each were given our own set of talents, our own set of passions. our own set of things that we are good at, that we enjoy, that we can bring that to the world. So when we're focusing on those things, not only are we making our lives better, but we're probably serving our families and our communities at large in a much more powerful way as well than when we are dragging around a bucket full of stuff that we don't even care about.

Speaker 00: 13:00

Now, I know some of you are thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but you just don't understand my situation. And we're going to talk about those kinds of intrusive thoughts in later podcast episodes. I don't want to go too far off on that tangent now. But honestly, I'm telling you that most of what's in your bucket can probably go if you take a really good, hard look at it. And then just imagine what that would feel like to slow life down, to feel less burden every day and it's completely within your power, at least in small baby steps. You may not be able to fix everything at once, but every rock that you take out of that bucket makes it lighter. So take a look at the small stuff. Is there something that you can donate today that frees up space in your closet? That's a really good way to start because it's very concrete. And sometimes that'll just kind of get you going with the momentum and you'll feel a little bit lighter. And when you feel how great that feels, you're going to want more of that. And it might just jumpstart you toward a massive life change that happens little by little. Have a great day, everybody.