BE A DO-ER

I was sitting on the couch after work one day when a restless feeling washed over me. I was a woman possessed, in need of something to do besides stare at moving pictures on screens. Life can somehow warp into this mindless repetitiveness where you feel as though you are doing the same things over and over, day after day, and suddenly I had had enough of it.

It's not as though my life is terribly mundane and it's not as though I never do any new things, but it was just feeling all sorts of one tracked and I needed an excuse to step out of the flow. So I got up off the couch and I boiled some water in a pot and I poured it into these old candles I had laying around telling myself for forever that one day I was going to clean them out.

And at that moment, something dawned on me.

Something that I should have realized a bit sooner in life and something that I'm mildly embarrassed to admit right now. But that would be the idea of "stop talking about doing it and just do it already."

Everyone always says things like "Oh, I really want to do that" or "Hey, this is on my bucket list! I should do this!" or "eventually I want to go to here and do this thing."

Well you know what? You're never gonna check things off your bucket list simply by saying that you want to do the thing on the list. You have to actually go do the thing. I tell you, it was the strangest of ah-ha moments because I kind of just wanted to smack myself on the head and go "well, duh Ralph."

So I did clean out those candles. And then I figured out how to peel the labels off so they are pretty glass jars now. And then I went and bought stuff to make sugar scrub to put in my nice clean candle jars as a gift.

And since then, I have been doing the things on my Pinterest boards instead of just letting them sit out there in the land of the internet waiting for that magical "someday" to appear on the horizon. Someday doesn't exist though. It's a thing that we've made up in our heads. I love the quote I've read a billion times in the way of fitness motivation that says "there are seven days in the week and someday isn't one of them." I mean, preach it sister.

Also, among my duh, Ralph epiphanies, is that when I am doing these things that I have been saying I will get around to doing for forever, there is this incredible sense of accomplishment that comes along with it. There is just something about being able to cross things off the list or put them in the "done" pile, or whatever your preferred method of organization be.

I've found that I am happier for having accomplished making/creating things instead of accomplishing finishing all the series of TV shows in my Netflix queue. In addition to my jars, I designed a pair of kick ass shoes for my roommate as well as the new spring coffee menu at work, made cold-brewed coffee, and tried some new recipes.

If my goal is to live a joy-filled year, this is definitely the direction I want to keep pursuing. I want to be a do-er instead of a say-er.