“Steal yourself some Me-time this year!”

“A great way to steal 30 minutes to yourself!” “This year, I’m going to steal time just for myself!” “The demands of life and the expectations of family can make it hard to even dream of stealing a little time for yourself.”

These quotes are just some of the many I’ve seen and heard in conversations, headlines, shampoo bottles and tweets during the first days of the year. Maybe it’s the New Year – New me -phase of the year pushing us some “well-deserved me-time”, “a moment just for you”, “the perfect escape”…

But I’d just want to clarify: Steal from who now?

We build up a picture of time as if it was something we couldn’t choose what to do with it. Someone is always demanding our time.

At home it belongs to the chores and the family, at work it belongs to the company, any given empty moment belongs to our phones, social media, commercials and somehow even the moments of exercise and healthy choices are a compulsion.

You’re not stealing those moments from anyone; whatever you do with the moments of your life – you’re making a choice.

You’re the creator, not a victim of your life.

It doesn’t matter if you’re spending time with your loved ones, making a work call out of office hours or reading a book and it doesn’t matter how these things make you feel, whether you feel like you have a choice or not – you’re still making one.

Even the most unpleasant decisions are choices. If you don’t decide on something, that’s also a choice. You choose to think that you’re stealing a moment for yourself. You choose to think that you’re trapped, that everything is compulsory.

Sure, many times in life you can’t choose EXACTLY what you’d want to do on ANY given moment, like you can’t leave from work in the middle of the day just because you feel like it. But in the long run, you choose to work in X workplace for X hours a week cause you want to live in X city with X square meters and maintain X lifestyle.

And by changing those variables – you make a choice of being the creator, not a victim. 

Happy New Year!

xx