Perspective, Peace, & Not Waiting To Be Happy All The Time
My wife left early this morning for a retreat and it took me a while to fall back asleep. Thankfully I did, but by the time I woke up there were tools on the kitchen counter, a new digital calendar unboxed and ready “to be activated,” and the beginnings of pancakes were underway. There are plenty of hard moments in this whole parenting journey, including as recently as yesterday afternoon and evening, so I’m taking a moment to enjoy the wins of these early/middle years.
And also finding moments to give myself a break, too. I like to knock out these pages before the girls are awake, or at least get started on them. Ideally, I’d be the kind of writer/creator who wrote days or weeks in advance. I’ve done the former, never the latter. And in the past, I could get caught up in beating myself up for not having a better (let’s be honest) any editorial calendar. Maybe I’ll get there at some point, I’m definitely working toward it, but for today it wasn’t in the cards.
Somewhere in those early morning hours trying to fall back asleep, my mind raced to an impactful interview with Emma Grede, mom of four and founder of three billion-dollar companies, on The Mel Robbins Podcast. (Shout out to my sister, Molly, for the share.) The whole pod is worth a listen and full of inspiration for anyone looking to change or do something in their own lives. The portion that jumped to me at 4:30 this morning was Emma’s “Rule of Thirds,” which basically states we can be happy a third of the time, we’ll feel things are “okay” a third of the time, and a third of the time things will be “crummy.” She framed this up in contrast to our desire for things to be good all the time.
And I definitely resonated with that. To use this morning’s example: I’d love to always have my posts planned out in advance and scheduled to go out at my weekly publishing time. As I type this, my “normal” publishing time was ten minutes ago, so that ship has sailed. This week’s writing flow falls into the “okay” or “crummy” category. And yet, I’m committed to this weekly rhythm, so probably more “okay” than “crummy.”
But this rule can apply to all of life, like parenting for example. Yesterday ended pretty firmly in the crummy category. Details don’t matter, but you can imagine one of those events where it just went south. And yet, this morning the girls are mostly getting along, making pancakes and eggs, and mostly giving me space to knock this post out. And that’s a pretty happy or great third of the pie.
What about self-image? Some of the time, I’m seeing the benefits of strength training, feel strong on a ride, and my body feels good. Other days, I look in the mirror and wonder “will I always have these love handles?”
Or meals and cooking: some weeks we plan everything out, buy the groceries, and actually eat all the groceries. Other weeks, we never get a chance to meal prep, or if we do buy groceries we only end up using half of them. Rule of thirds again.
I’m working on a new project, and sometimes ideas and energy flow. And other times it’s like pulling teeth and I have momentary wonderings of have I made a huge mistake in pushing forward here? Rule of thirds.
In all these spaces, and probably more, it’s easy to find myself wanting things to be in the happy or easy third of the pie. But when we chase that one piece (happiness) and try to cling to it all the time, we end up forfeiting our peace. Read that last line again.
I had this brilliant 4:30am thought that the peace symbol was made of thirds and so is the perfect image to explain this feeling of chasing happiness, but when you only have one piece of the peace symbol you don’t have peace. When I looked it up this morning, turns out, the peace symbol is not in thirds…. And yet, the image still holds. If our life is the whole pie and we keep expecting the whole pie to be happiness all the time, we’ll be sorely disappointed. Life just generally doesn’t go that way.
If we can find some contentment or equanimity, to borrow from our Buddhist friends, we might find a bit more peace. Not because things are going well all the time, but because we knew things weren’t going to go well all the time. And, yes, this can feel really obvious and like we already “know” it. But if you’re anything like me, you still get hoodwinked by life and popular culture to expect things to be all happy-go-lucky all the time. Or that if just _____ would happen, then things would be happy all the time and I’d be ok.
The beauty of the rule of thirds is the acknowledgement that sometimes things are great, sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are just okay, and because we know that, we can be okay with it. We don’t have to beat ourselves up for things going sideways, because of course things will go sideways some of the time.
And in case you forget, just think of the peace symbol, and then you might remember that some guy thought the peace symbol had three pieces and how poetic that was, and also “what was he thinking,” and then you’ll get on with your happy day because shouldn’t we all have more of those?
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Where could you use the “rule of thirds” in your life?