Are you serious about your free time?

We work a lot in our lifetime. We go to school, we follow additional courses, we make a career. We commute to work, take care of our children and our home. We can be very serious about all that. I know I was and still am. Some people like to fantasize what they would do when they would win the lottery. What would you do?

 

This question is aiming at what you desire to do when you could have all the time in the world.

 

What do we enjoy doing in our free time? All the energy and planning devoted into our working time, the leisure part should be the easy part, isn’t it? We want to relax, be happy and have fun. The only obstacles we see is time and money. Sometimes we look at others and we try a pilates class or end up at an amusement park. We host parties or barbeques, we might go shopping or follow yet an additional course.

 

We miss out on a lot of life when we don’t do some serious soul searching in regards to our free time. We should apply the same reason and effort to leisure as we do in our career. I’m not implying that energy and devotion should be perfectly balanced all the time between career and free time but I think that we could benefit a great deal by applying some of the same resources to a domain that apparently is so easy to develop. We know what we like to do right? We know how to relax? It should be the easiest thing to do.

 

Yet still, I did miss the ball there. I missed out on the opportunity to apply my uniqueness into my free time. What gives me energy may be not the same thing that brings joy to others. When stressed out and tired my hobbies were mainly to take my mind of of things, to escape the situation I found myself in. Spending much time behind the screen or cleaning and ‘getting things done’ became a priority at all time besides commuting and working. I created many systems to be more efficient in the things that needed to be done besides ‘work-work’. There was ‘home-work’ and ‘self-care-work’.

 

Are you serious about pleasure?

 

Confronted with burnout the question arose what I as an unique individual liked to do. What? When we tend to undertake what others do for pleasure, we miss out on a chance to develop our personality. We jump from one thing to another without letting the roots grow. To expand our branches we need to take care of the roots. You can say what you want but it shows, it shows in your branches when your roots are cut short.

 

To develop yourself requires to stay true to yourself. I got very distracted by the influence of others because I lacked a sense of my true self. I was a true people pleasure but I left myself out of the ‘people’. We need to discover our own taste in things and stay loyal and faithful to that. To start we need to have a very clear and distinctive idea what we really like. To make this more clear I could say that I like to cook vegan. It does bring me pleasure. But does all vegan food bring me joy? Definitely not. What I like to do is to find really good recipes, particular dishes that I enjoy making and tasting. When you like pizza, there is that one particular kind that will make you smile. It is the power of details that makes a great difference in experiencing pleasure.

 

What are we going to say no to and what details can we stress going forward? I do believe we need to be very selfish in order to grow and to be able to make a powerful contribution to society. Our weekends and free time can carry our own footprint.

 

 

Other posts on how to spend your free time:

Jo from Through My Eyes wrote a follow up from her unique perspective. You can read her post here.

 

References.

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Picture credits click here.