The blessing of boring

Do not let this world fool you into forgetting what matters!

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

I want to talk about boring. By boring I mean consistent, same, not out of the ordinary, peaceful, sometimes redundant. I’ve spoken here about how peace is a win, but I want to encourage you to think about boring in a new way.

Last week in our Focus First call in the Best Today® Community I referenced a visual planning video that I recorded three years ago and when I mentioned that the flow of my days is still the exact same as it was three+ years ago, it surprised some.

The flow of my days, the cadence of my life, what gets my time, what I value, looks the same day after day, week after week, year after year. There are some small things that may change as my children get older, but the flow is still the same. Some may even say—boring. Not boring in that my life isn’t filled with joy, fun, or interest, but boring in that I have found what works well and I don’t seek out distractions from it.

Rejecting Boring.

For the past decade I have taught a lot of the same principles. I teach the basic principles of how to steward your time well, and I see how people think it’s too simple and they go on to look for something less “boring.”

Through media and access to falsified “reality” television, fiction, and fantasy, I think humans have forgotten the whole point. Relationships weren’t designed to be harmful, unhealthy, chaotic, and dramatic. Neither was life.

Have you ever found yourself enjoying your a day, or an event, or your life in general, and then say, “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop?” That’s the brain being trained to believe that something has to always be wrong or going on. It won’t accept the blessing of boring.

And to be clear, boring isn’t necessarily the absence of challenge, hardship, loss, sickness, and the like. Life will offer us those things the longer we keep living.

The “boring” is finding out what you value and incorporating it in your every day life. My “boring” is starting my day with time for myself (I talk about that here), being in community with my family, friends and neighbors, engaging in work that uses my talents and fits within my seasonal boundaries, resting, reading, laughing, and loving (and the occasional shopping *wink wink*).

My rhythms and cadence are about the same on any given day in any given month, with the exceptions that come when we invite in change—a family trip or time off for example. But even in those, not much changes. I have embraced the boring.

Doing the same thing over and over and over….

An example I gave in the Best Today® Community this morning during our Tuesday Talk is this. Inside of the Best Today® Guide morning page is a page that asks you every single morning to reflect on, and identify, what matters in this specific day and what doesn’t. You’re also given space to write out your vision for your life. Initially, customers asked, “am I supposed to do this every day? Answer the same questions every day?”

My answer—yes. Boring right? But what am I really doing in asking you to do these reflections daily, at the start of your day? I am engaging you in thinking about things that matter. In asking you to consider what is important today, you narrow your focus to “one today at a time” instead of thinking about all that you need to do this week, this month, this year. You identify what matters.

And what happens to a person who builds a habit of being introspective about what matters, what they value, and their vision for their life? It pours out into other parts of your day and life. When you want to reach for the phone to scroll perhaps you’ll remember—this isn’t what I said was most important today. This is something I actually identified this morning that I wanted to avoid. You begin to make choices with your values and vision in mind because you’ve done the “boring” exercise of reflecting and writing about it every single day, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

It’s the blessing of boring. Not only does it do things like bring calm, peace, and a feeling of stability into your life and body, it also helps you to recognize when things are offered to you to distract you from your values and goals.