My Theory of Everything
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Today I am continuing with the lessons I have learned over the past decade, and today’s lesson is brought to you by my book - Everything is a Thing. Publishing my book this year was hands down one of the achievements I am most proud of this decade, and in my life. I could write a whole book on the things I learned during that process, but don’t worry, I won’t. Instead, today I am going to tell you about my “Theory of Everything”. A Wikipedia search will tell you that for years, scientists have been searching for “a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe” which they would call the theory of everything. They and you will be relieved to know - I haven’t found it.
My theory of everything consists of three pillars which I have discovered over the past few years, which has been a combination of many of the things I learned as a young student of pure science and as I have become older and more interested in people. It is the thing that as I have settled more and more into it, I have become more comfortable with myself and the things about me which seem to wildly contradict one another, and less interested in fitting myself into one particular box. The three pillars of my theory of everything are three of the biggest lessons I learned in relation to my well-being and mental health and they are as follows.
There is no one way. As someone who discovered personal development in my late twenties, it was great to find authors and their books that I felt explained things about my behaviour that I couldn’t previously understand. And it was great until I started to come to the recommendations that they were making. Don’t get me wrong - many of them were good recommendations, but one thing that struck me was that the writers seemed to be suggesting that their solution was the way.
The way to eat, to meditate, to journal, to wake up in the morning, to go to sleep at night, to “find our passion”, to “fix” ourselves. As time went on, I became uncomfortable with the suggestions to do things a certain way. I have never felt as if I fit into any one box and for a long time, I felt as if I should, and that I needed to pick one thing, and focus on doing and being that one thing, if I wanted to make my way in the world. Choose a box. And the fact that I didn’t want to sometimes left me feeling judged as people accused me of “lacking commitment” and questioned me about what was holding me back from picking something.
I was pleased to find Emilie Wapnick’s book while I was going through this, and she wrote about being a multipotentialite in her book “How to be Everything” where for the first time I felt that being more than one thing wasn’t a sign of weakness, but was just a reflection of the fact that there is no one way to be. That is a part of the reason why much of my blogging and my book is about ideas, and how I used them in my life. I want to stimulate you to have ideas about how to use these concepts in your life, based on who you are, and how you want to live, and what is important to you in terms of your values.
The truth is - there are many ways to eat, to meditate, to wake up in the morning and so on - and we don’t need to “fix ourselves” if we feel as if we don’t fit into one box or another. Sometimes our greatest weaknesses are our greatest strengths. Sometimes our most colossal mistakes, and the horrible things that happen to us are the things that bring us gifts that we could never imagine.
Those thoughts and dreams and desires that we have are legit, and don’t need to be replaced with other people’s versions of success. For me - I had to embrace that I wasn’t prepared to do or to be just one thing. To have just one message, or one interest. To commit to just one thing. Everything is a thing. There is no one way. And once I was able to embrace that, I was also able to really understand pillar two.
We are 360 degree individuals. It is so easy to define ourselves by one area of our lives. It could be our career (for example “I am a dentist”) or it could be a role within our family. It could even be an aspect of our health (I am a gym nut). There are so many reasons why we seek out and claim these labels for ourselves, and trust me - I have a few labels that bring me great joy and pride (my favourite one of course is auntie - and you can read about that one here!)
However, I learned that we are all multi-faceted people and that we have to remember to pay attention to each of our parts. This became important to me when I started to think about looking after both my mental and physical health. I realized that paying a lot of attention to only one side of myself meant that I neglected other parts of myself. That those other parts needed nurturing, needed relationships and needed care. While I don’t know if it is possible to achieve “balance”
I definitely know that if one area of my life suffers, then it limits how well I can do in any other area, and so it is as important to work as it is to feel purposeful. It is as important to have fun as it is to focus on career and finances. Remembering to acknowledge the different parts of myself and give them some love has gone a long way to making my life more joyful. This brings me to the third pillar
Remember the rate limiting step - Following on from pillar number two, another nod to my love for the sciences, and something I wrote about extensively here. Read an excerpt from it below.
According to Wikipedia, the overall rate of a reaction is often approximately determined by the slowest step, known as the rate limiting step (or rate determining step). This means that no matter how quickly the other components are able to react, the thing step that determines the progress of the reaction is the slowest.
And this is something that I always think about as I journey through life. It is easy to believe that my rate of progress in any project will be determined by the amount of effort that I put in, by the places where I hustle and strive the most, and the action steps that I take. However, I find that it is often determined much further down the chain - by the things that I pay the least attention to. To give one example - often my rate limiting step is something as simple as sleep! Sometimes I make the point to get up super early and sacrifice sleep so that I can be more productive - but then I find that tasks which might otherwise take me 20 minutes take way over an hour, and are not done quite as well.
There are other times that my rate limiter is another aspect of my health, my hydration etc. When I think that I don’t have time to stop and take care of myself, I discover that is the very thing that is hindering my progress. Other examples can be our spiritual relationship, our interpersonal relationships, eating healthy, or cleaning the kitchen before we start our meal prep. And my favourite one - reading all the instructions before baking a new recipe! I saw it in so many places, and it was a powerful lesson for me. It taught me to consider the importance of all aspects of my life - no matter what I was working on - and not to neglect the seemingly unrelated relationships with others or myself in favour of the outcome…
For me - once I began to observe this, I started to look into my own life, to see what changes I could make so that I could make achieve my goals! Drinking more water and getting more sleep. Making time for my relationships. Automating my self care at work (this will be a subject of a later post - but for example - pre-booking my vacations and time off instead of waiting until I am wiped out to try to squeeze time in). And having fun!! My biggest rate limiting step is taking life too seriously. This stifles my curiosity, and my joy, and honestly - it is when I am curious that I can find creative solutions to my problems, and great blog topics!
A friend told me a story once of two woodcutters both chopping down a tree. One spent the entire day cutting, while the other one seemed to stop every hour for several minutes. At the end of the day, the one who had taken the breaks had actually achieved more than the one who had been cutting constantly all day. When asked how he achieved it, when he had taken so many breaks he said “I was sharpening my axe”. I always found that story a perfect summary of this idea. Sometimes if we aren’t making the progress we think we should be making, we need to ask ourselves what is our rate limiting step - perhaps getting more sleep, having fun with our friends, or sharpening our axe before preparing to tackle a big project (or a big onion - sharpen your knives people!!!).
These three pillars have been both my lessons and my teachers as I have journeyed through this last decade, and through life.
I have found that those who have the loudest voices are sometimes viewed as the ones who are right. A friend and I were recently discussing how the people who believe in the one right way are often shouting it from the rooftops, and so it is easy to get caught up in believing that what is the right way for them should be the right way for you, and going down a comparison spiral - something I have often caught myself doing.
Comparing my writing about many different topics to those who solidly only write about one thing. Comparing how I think about things to others. Even judging my ebbs against my flows. If there is one lesson in this, it is to try things and see if they work for you, but also not to beat yourself up if they don’t. It is not to use the books and the information out there as a prescription pad, but rather to treat them as a buffet and see what you like and what you don’t before going back for a second taste. It is to remember that we are whole individuals and to realize that one approach may work in one part of your life, but not in another. It would be to come up with your own theory of everything and to remember that it is just as legitimate as someone else’s, and to remember that out there somewhere is another person who will appreciate your experience and feel a little like you. This is my theory of everything. What is yours? I would love to hear it in the comments!!
And I send you big love from a small island.