Thursday, July 5, 2012

What is Compleace?

Once, I was a participant in a self-help improvement type class where we did an exercise to prioritize different aspects of your life.  Each person was given a stack of 30 cards that listed priorities, and we were told to pick the ten most important of those cards.  The cards included words such as:
  • Religion
  • Family
  • Career
  • Nourishment
  • Inner Peace
  • Prayer
  • Sleep
  • Working Out
  • Volunteering
Most people had no trouble sorting the list down to 10 cards.  There were plenty of cards that overlapped that you could eat well, love your family, satisfy your religious beliefs, and still have a career, by selecting 10 of the cards. 
But then we were told to sort those to five cards. 
Again, looking very broadly, you could sort that down to five options. 
Then, we were to pick three cards to represent our life priorities. 
I looked at my stack of cards.  I really don't remember what they all were, but one of them was a card that read "Inner Peace."  In that moment I realized that I only needed one card to prioritize my life.  Inner Peace.
It was an exercise that, in hindsight, sounds silly.  But there was an emotional aspect to sitting there trying to decide if I was going to keep the "Career" of the "Family" priority.  Nobody would know, of course.  It wasn't as though the instructor would call my grandmother afterward, and I would have to face the consequences at the next family gathering.  But when I thought about taking my family out of the pile of priorities, it made my uncomfortable.  It upset my inner peace. 
I realized that every card I pulled out of the pile, I had ultimately made a final decision based on the effect it had on my inner peace.  So while the exercise ended with three priority cards, I only chose one.  From that day on, whenever I've been confronted with internal conflict of any variety, I've realized that my decisions were based on a matter of the effect these actions would have on my Inner Peace. 

For a thirty-something single woman in today's society, just as it is for anybody in today's society, there are a lot of challenges to my Inner Peace.  I have started this blog in order to share the thought process that I use when facing all of life's challenges, including but not limited to my career, my body image, dating, and finances. 

Come, join me, and though our Inner Peace let's become Compleace.