The Three R's of My "Staycation"

If I had to give a theme to the past few days, I’d have to say that it has been all about the 3-R’s: Reorganization, Reconnecting and a Redirection of my life.

Reorganization: 

I once read that to simplify your life you need to get rid of all the excess items that are holding you down. That being said, over this past Thanksgiving break I had plenty of time to myself to do just that.  Each morning I woke up bright and early ready to sweep through one room at a time trashing things that I hadn’t used in a while. I’m normally a person who struggles with getting rid of things because I never know when I might use it again but I decided that if I hadn’t used it, wore it, read it or even looked at it within the past year it was time to let go of it.   I was able to go though a lot of areas of my home, get rid of a lot of things that I no longer used. I reorganized things that for so long I have been meaning to do but for one reason or another just kept putting off.

So what was the final verdict: I now have room to walk in my walk-in closet which before I couldn’t even do, I have extra space in my home office, an area in my laundry room to actually sit my laundry basket and space in my kitchen that was once cluttered with things that I had collected over the years but never used.

I donated about 65% of my clothes to Goodwill along with some books and kitchen items and the rest went into the trash! It was shocking but I actually felt as if a weight was removed. I guess you never really pay attention to how “stuff” can add excess weight to your life and hold you down.

The lesson I learned here: If you don’t need it, let it go and this doesn’t just apply to stuff but to every aspect of your life.

Reconnecting:

One thing that people tend to do at the beginning of every year is say I’m going to start doing this or doing that and maybe we do for a few months but then life seems to always get in the way and those little things that we hoped to keep doing fade away until eventually we no longer remember why we wanted to do them in the first place. In the time I had to myself I was able to sit and think about different areas of my life that wanted to spend more time in or that I was already spending time on but not as much as I’d like. What I realized is that happiness is loosing site of the things you love to do but making time to do them.  Should we really put off today what we could do tomorrow when we aren’t even promised a tomorrow? It amazing the in 5 short days I was able to reconnect with myself, my soul and with the things that I missed and loved. Reconnecting with yourself is a lot like rediscovering who you are and then understanding why you let yourself go in a different direction.  Most people lose their selves in the daily demands of life and other commitments that caused them to push what they really want aside. How many times have you read or heard about those few people who just quit their job and go off to do what really makes them happy and to be honest, don’t those people seem happier, less stressed and more focused on what life is really about. No, I’m not going off to explore the world but I am taking it one step at a time and I’m so excited to see where my new reconnection is going to take me!

Redirection:

I have found that redirection is a lot like reconnection though for me; my redirection is with my faith and relationship with God. For a large portion of my life I have had a fairly good relationship with God.  However, I have been reading a book titled Crazy Love and the first few pages of this book completely took what I thought I was doing and tore it to shreds, all the times I felt I was close with God, nope I wasn’t even a flicker in His shadow. Because I put so much stock in my relationship with Christ, to me these realizations were so horrifying and I immediately knew where I needed to make the redirection to my focus in my life.

So these are the 3-R’s that I was able to journey through in what I call a 5-day “staycation” and to be honest I loved every minute of it. At times it was a lot of quiet contemplation and thoughtfulness while other times it was running around, cleaning and staying up late to get things done but no matter what, it was what I needed!

I know a lot of people are going to shy away from reading my site now because of my open expression to my love for Christ but that’s okay because where 10 leave, 30 more will join and even if that doesn’t happen, what really matters to me is that I’m giving glory to God, which to be honest is the whole point of what life is all about.

So that being said, you have probably noticed a few small changes to my site and a lot of them have to do with these 3-R’s, a word of caution: there will be more to come and believe me, it will all be surrounding these 3 topics!