Intention
Lately something that has been on my mind is the difference between living intentionally and living out of mere “habit.”
I think often something that gets a bad rep in society (mostly American) today is routine. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen little quote pictures on Pinterest or Tumblr: “The biggest destroyer of creativity: routine” or “The worst enemy to your creative life: routine” or that phrase reworded any hundreds of ways that it can be.
I can’t disagree more with this statement. The biggest enemy to creativity is not routine. The biggest enemy to creativity is laziness. Unfortunately for many people (me sitting in the front row of this group of people), this is the real enemy of creativity. I’ve lived the past two years of my life with literally no structure besides when I would go to classes. I would eat when I wanted, do my homework when I wanted, sleep when I wanted, pray when I wanted… I would do all of the things, yes. But the lack of structure in my life did not make me any more creative at all; it made me horribly restless and thus uncreative. We have this romantic idea of “freedom” and that freedom is getting to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it… but the key to character is what one does with that freedom or free time. Unfortunately my own either lazy or extreme tendencies led me to not really use all of this “free” time very fruitfully. I was recently told that what we do with our time of rest (our free time) should be refreshing and remind us who we really are in order to make us even more fruitful in all areas of our life.
Extreme really is the best way to desribe the way that I would use my time: I would either get SO into my schoolwork that I would literally do nothing else with my time: avoiding sleep, prayer, food, fellowship, hygiene or any other of my basic needs. Then I would get so tired that I would just sleep the next day every chance that I could. Then I would become so unnourished spiritually that I would (and I’m not lying to you at all) spend like 7 hours combined a day in prayer. This left no time for me to read, write, dance, pin things on Pinterest, or any other of the myriad of things that gets me feeling creatively stimulated. I was either too tired, too much in dire need of communion with God, too unshowered, or too behind in homework. All of these things that I would be doing in excess are definitely all good things. The problem isn’t that I wasn’t doing good things… the problem is that I had no balance of time in regard to doing a variety of good things.
Routine thus is NOT a bad thing. In fact I see it as an even better thing if lived with intention. This means really living your life how you want to be living your life. Ernest Hemingway touches on what I am saying when he says:
“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
Living with intention is about really, REALLY being present. Living with intention is about keeping your promises; being a man or woman of your word. It’s about being able to look back and literally ANY given situation that you were in and being able to say that your whole self was present there: your true self in all of its beauty. It’s about not waiting to be beautiful or cool or friendly. It’s about saying “I want to be cool,” or “I want to be holy” not as some future goal to meet but as something that you’re actively engaged in now.
There’s no time to waste. I agree that living out of mere “habit” definitely isn’t in agreement with living with “intention.” The word “habit” suggests that one is not thinking about the action they are performing when performing it. The “habit” characteristic of having structure in one’s life, in having a routine needs to be destroyed and replaced with “intention.” There’s nothing wrong with waking up at 6:00 am everyday, and doing so could be considered a habit. But what is your intention of waking up at 6:00 am? Figuring out what your intention is for every situation or action in life is what is the key.
So live intentionally: in your relationships, when you sleep, when you have conversations, when you eat, when you drive to work… everything! Take in each moment and breathe deeply… focus on now in light of the eternal and be.
be beautiful. you are loved.
praying for you,
-Jess
jessicafeaulait 