“What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.” Samuel Johnson
Life is so hard sometimes! There is so much stress. The to-do lists never end, life happens all the time and craziness abounds despite our best efforts at control. But a hard life doesn’t mean a bad life! It’s just hard. It takes effort. It’s not carefree and relaxed all the time. And would we really want it to be? Because if life was easy we would never grow. We only grow when we stretch and leave our comfort zone, whether by choice or circumstance. And stretching ourselves is never easy. So easy isn’t want we want. I think what we really want is just a little ease in as many aspects of life as possible!
Ease is a kind of flow. A rhythm to the day and life that leaves room for…whatever it is you want to leave room for. The things that bring meaning to your life and make you happy and bring you joy.
Ease and easy are very close in meaning, but there is a subtle difference that makes ALL the difference.
Easy: not hard or difficult; requiring no great labor or effort:
Ease: freedom from concern, anxiety, or solicitude; a quiet state of mind:
Can we have freedom from concern, anxiety and a quiet state of mind while doing hard or difficult things with great labor and effort? Sure we can. I think we often don’t, but we CAN.
Ease comes from inspired action. It comes from knowing what we want and committing to a plan of action. It comes from getting out of our own way.
Ease is having a plan in place with clear guidelines and priorities set. The plan has been scheduled into your day giving you clear boundaries of time with which to make things happen.
Ease is about simplifying the steps you need to take, rather than trying to skip them. It’s not about shortcuts.
Ease comes from saying no to things that don’t align with your purpose and goals right now. And not feeling bad about it!
Ease is about enjoying the benefits of habits you have worked hard to create and relishing in the rewards of your commitment to your goals.
As it relates to a healthy lifestyle, often in the hopes of a “quick fix” we forget there is a process and necessary, sometimes difficult (or at least labor intensive) steps to follow.
Living a healthy lifestyle is infinitely rewarding, but it is not easy. It requires, among many other things, prioritizing, planning, shopping, prepping, cooking, exercising. Those things are hard sometimes, and chores much the time. But they are labors of love for yourself and your family and the benefits far outweigh the chore of the task itself. That’s why you do it!
It really comes down to habits. Our lives run on them. Habits are what get us through our days without much thought. Where we have habits in place we have ease.
The healthy lifestyle that comes rather easily to me now, didn’t create itself. My ease comes from the habits I’ve put into place, the priority I have placed on it and the space I’ve created for it in my life. I didn’t wake up with healthy habits, I woke up every day and created them. It’s the work that creates lasting change, which in turn creates ease. For me, it helps that I am intentionally designing my life around the things I really care about and bring me joy. However, it is not easy!
It’s like physical training. The training you need to go through to accomplish a difficult goal, like a marathon. It’s hard at first, to even run those first few miles, but it gets easier as you train. It never becomes easy to run the marathon, but it becomes do-able. Something that it wasn’t before.
One of my roles as a health coach is to encourage others that prioritizing their health is not just another stressful thing on the to-do list, but a priority that affects every other area of their life. It is also to help my clients understand both the very basics of living a healthy lifestyle as well as the more complex issues around the often confusing jumble of information that is nutrition science. And I always find myself trying to find ways to make it easy for them. Easy to understand, yes, but also easy to implement my recommendations. And this is where I always struggle. I struggle because I can’t make it easy for them. I can help them develop a manageable plan and give suggestions, but it is up to them to implement them. And it’s not always easy. But when they do it creates such ease in their life!
I’m always inspired when people commit and make the changes. I’m just finishing up an 11-day cleanse with a group that committed and made some changes over 11 days and is now reaping the benefits. And a cleanse is not always easy to commit to and can push some right out of their comfort zones! But they are doing it and that always inspires me and keeps me going!
So I’ve decided I can never make it eas-y, but what I can do is try to pass on the tools I have used to create more ease around healthy living in my own life.
How do you attempt to create more ease in your life? What are your challenges? Please let me know in the comments!
Live nourished,
Heather
