Just Integrate All The Parts
Do you compartmentalize your life, or do you blend everything into everything else? Is it mish-mosh, or lots of tiny rooms in the house of your life?
If your life is compartmentalized, then everything is separate and perhaps unequal: work, play, leisure, social friends, professional friends, family, and volunteerism. Work friends do not meet the family, who does not meet social friends, who don’t volunteer. Only family is invited for Thanksgiving; that sort of thing. But what if all the parts of our life were integrated? Would that be bad?
The small brain under the big brain is the cerebellum, and it integrates how our body functions. It explains how we can drive and eat at the same time. Or run on the treadmill and read, expecting to benefit from both. It allows everything to work together: good vision helps movement, balance helps confidence. Everything affects and impacts everything else. We can jog, chat, chew gum, and check out the “hotties” across the street because our cerebellum integrates all that we are doing. We don’t have to stop and do one thing at a time. It isn’t either or; it’s “and”. We can walk “and” talk, etc. So why don’t we utilize it with all of our life experiences?
Our personal life wanders into our professional life, whether we like it or not. We learn manners at the dinner table; we practice them at work. I hope. We learn how to focus in sports; it helps us focus on finishing projects. We have a fight with our spouse; it affects our work. Duh! Of course personal affects professional, and vice versa. Consider taking a moment to acknowledge it, and move on, instead of ignoring it and allowing it to shadow us until we can resolve it, whenever that may happen. Acknowledge now, breathe, resolve to resolve later.
Everything we have ever done makes us who we are now. We should celebrate cumulative life experiences; they lead us to our current way of thinking, and who we become over the years. How we think now is all that matters, not how we thought twenty five years and a lifetime ago. How I think at any one time is influenced by what goes on around me, and how I integrate it into what is happening now, based on past experience. I can influence my surroundings, or be influenced by them. One is active, the other is reactive. Acknowledge that your life is many parts, and some of them overlap. Enough with trying to keep every part of life separate from every other part. Blend, experiment and share, celebrate.
That’s Aging Intelligently.