Celebrate the Lazy

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The other day at clinic, my supervisor, a fellow grad student, and I were all sitting around talking about the stresses of grad school and the little nuisances you can't understand until you've done it yourself. And we came upon the topic of busy. In our program, as in many I'm assuming, we become so consumed with success and one-upping each other that we forget about the big picture. We forget about the people behind the masks of insecurities. I'm guilty of this myself. Someone says how stressed they are, how busy they are, and you sit there, get the wide eyed "don't I know it" look and give your complaints about how busy you are. It's a really fun game where everyone feels great about themselves after...

So I had an idea.

What if we celebrated the leisure activities, the productivity, the Netflix binges and with total sincerity said, "Hey! Good for you! You deserve that! Take that time to stop and breathe!" 

Why do we celebrate stress and being overly busy?? Don't we know it only leads to heart disease, depression, anxiety, etc?? Yet we continue to do it! France takes off an entire month to relax and we barely allow ourselves a week! The American lifestyle is fairly toxic and I want to become more aware of when I'm praising my busy and not praising my sweet moments of silence. I've become so used to filling up all my moments with some kind of noise that I can't even sit alone with myself anymore. That's sad! 

I love Kenny Chesney's song "Noise" for this very reason. He says, "we can't sleep, we can't think, can't escape the noise, we can't take the noise so we just make noise." I honestly haven't heard anything truer in a while. I'm tired of all the hate in the world, all the judgement, all the fear and instead want to congratulate the good, the brave and the joyful. Because it's out there but we are surrounded by noise! 

So I'm going to try and be more intentional about my thoughts, my actions and my words and celebrate the quiet moments and the lazy days for me and for those around me. Don't feel guilty! Revel in the lazy!! Because, let's be real, the lazy I'm talking about and what you're talking about is likely looooooong overdue.