Tag: mental-health

For many years, quick action has been one of my most valuable habits.

When an opportunity appeared, I tried something. When an idea came, I took a first step. I learned that thinking alone could only take me so far.

Action creates feedback.

Once I do something, reality responds. Then I can learn, adjust, and act again.

Recently, however, I have been learning almost the opposite.

Sometimes I should not act.

An idea comes, but I leave it alone.

Something interests me, but I do not immediately turn it into a goal.

I have started singing, for example. My old approach could easily turn this into another project: find the best teacher, develop a practice schedule, measure progress, set goals.

But now I am experimenting with something different.

I enjoy it.

I wonder where it might lead.

And then I let it float.

At first, this seemed contradictory to my habit of quick action. Should I respond quickly to an internal signal, or should I wait?

I am beginning to think that a rich life requires both.

The real skill may be knowing when to act and when to let something remain unfinished.

Not every idea deserves action.

Some thoughts come from anxiety. Some come from boredom. Some are simply excitement about something new. If I immediately respond to every thought, my life becomes scattered.

But something interesting happens when I leave an idea alone.

Some ideas disappear.

Others return.

A thought comes back while I am walking. A week later, it appears again. I try something small and feel unexpectedly alive. I leave it alone again, but the interest remains.

Perhaps this is one way we begin distinguishing noise from signal.

But there is also danger in waiting forever.

A genuine signal can remain an attractive possibility for years if I never allow it to touch reality.

At some point, action becomes necessary.

Take one small step.

Then listen again.

Maybe the mature rhythm is not simply action or waiting.

It is:

Notice → Float → Discern → Act → Receive feedback → Float again.

I also wonder whether life experience helps us become better at this.

When we are younger, every strong feeling can seem important. Excitement, ambition, anxiety, curiosity, and ego can sound remarkably similar.

After living longer, perhaps we begin recognizing the voices.

I know this feeling. This is probably anxiety.

This is my desire for recognition.

This excitement will probably disappear.

But occasionally:

This is interesting. This thought keeps returning.

That is where experience becomes useful in a completely different way.

The first half of life taught me how to act.

Now I am learning when not to act.

Neither is enough by itself.

If I turn everything into a goal, life becomes narrow.

If I leave everything floating, nothing becomes real.

Perhaps wisdom lives somewhere between them.

Leave enough space for something unexpected to appear.

Leave it alone long enough to discover whether it matters.

When the signal becomes clear, take a small step.

Then become quiet enough to listen again.

Some things need action.

Others need the freedom to remain unfinished.

Learning the difference may be one of the gifts of growing older.

For much of my life, being useful gave me a sense of purpose.

Someone needed something from me. There was a problem to solve, work to finish, a responsibility to carry, or someone I could help.

Being needed felt meaningful.

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, much of the meaning in our lives comes from contributing to others. I am grateful for the years when I could work hard, build things, and be useful to many people.

But recently, I have begun to notice another question.

Does everything I do need to be useful?

Sometimes I sing worship songs written by other people. I am not producing anything. Nobody is listening. I am not becoming more successful or contributing to anyone.

Sometimes I simply sing.

And unexpectedly, I feel deeply connected to God. Sometimes I feel His presence without needing to understand anything intellectually. Sometimes tears come.

Nothing has been accomplished.

Yet those moments do not feel empty.

In fact, they sometimes feel more alive than many productive hours.

This has made me wonder how deeply I have connected the value of my life with usefulness.

For many years, the equation was almost automatic:

If I am useful, my time has value.

But perhaps there is another way to live:

My life itself has value, including experiences that produce nothing for anyone else.

That is surprisingly difficult for me to accept.

Even when I make time for myself, I easily turn it into another project. If I sing, perhaps I should become a better singer. If I learn piano, perhaps I should practice systematically. If I write, perhaps it should become a book.

Very quickly, curiosity becomes a goal.

Then the goal becomes a plan.

And soon the open space is full again.

I am beginning to think that this is exactly what I should not do too quickly.

Perhaps some parts of life should remain unexplained and unproductive for a while.

Sing because I want to sing.

Walk somewhere simply because I have never been there.

Spend an hour following an idea without knowing whether it will lead anywhere.

This does not mean turning away from other people.

Strangely, I suspect the opposite may eventually happen.

When we spend our entire lives producing for others, what we give can gradually become repetitive. But when we have enough space to explore our own inner world, something new may grow there.

Eventually, we may have something deeper and more original to offer.

But even that cannot become the reason for everything.

I do not need to enjoy life today so that I can become more useful tomorrow.

Sometimes today is allowed simply to be today.

Perhaps this is one of the transitions I am learning now.

From:

“My life receives its value from being useful to other people.”

toward:

“My life itself has value.”

I still want to contribute. I still want to help people. I still want to create things worth sharing.

But I do not need to turn every curiosity into a project, every experience into an achievement, or every discovery into a destination.

Perhaps for a while, I can simply explore.

Slowly. Curiously. Without needing to turn every discovery into a destination.

My daughter once said something very simple:

“Find something new every day.”

She seems to know naturally how to enjoy life. She cooks, bakes bread, fishes, sings, writes songs, paints, and tries whatever catches her interest. She does not have unlimited time or money. She simply seems curious about life.

Recently, I realized that I am learning from her.

For many years, I lived very differently. I concentrated my time and energy on a few things, particularly surgery and research. That concentration helped me go deeply into those worlds, but it also meant sacrificing many other possibilities.

Now I have started something almost completely new to me.

I have learned to start very small.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

Try something and see what happens.

But then I realized something.

I had already learned “find something new every day” through triathlon.

I have been swimming, biking, and running for years. From the outside, there is nothing new about another morning run or another hour in the pool.

But somehow it rarely feels exactly the same.

During a swim, I might notice a tiny difference in how my hand enters the water or how my pelvis rotates. During a run, I notice a subtle change in coordination, cadence, posture, or breathing.

Sometimes the discovery is so small that nobody else could see it.

But I can feel it.

And that tiny discovery makes an ordinary workout interesting again.

This made me wonder whether “find something new every day” does not necessarily mean doing something new.

Perhaps it means seeing something new in what I am already doing.

That changes the idea completely.

I may work with the same people and encounter many of the same problems.

But perhaps I do not have to return as the same person.

For much of my professional life, I naturally measured things.

How many cases?

How many papers?

How much funding?

Am I making the right decision?

Do people recognize my contribution?

Do they need me?

These questions helped drive me forward for many years.

But they also made life a continuous evaluation.

Recently, I have begun wondering what would happen if I entered the same world with a different question:

What can I discover today that I did not know yesterday?

A patient’s physiology.

A small technical detail.

An unexpected research result.

A change in another person.

A change in myself.

Even disappointment might contain something I have never noticed before.

The scenery could be exactly the same, yet my experience of it could become completely different.

Maybe curiosity can gradually replace evaluation.

Instead of constantly asking whether I am succeeding, advancing, appreciated, or making the right choice, I can sometimes simply ask:

What is happening here?

There will always be responsibilities and outcomes that matter. Curiosity does not remove them.

But perhaps they do not have to determine whether a day feels meaningful.

Now, I do not need a completely new life every day.

I just need to remain interested in the life already in front of me.

Try something new.
Notice something small.
Follow curiosity.
Look again at something familiar.

There is always something I have not seen yet.

Find something new every day.

Quick action has been one of the most precious habits I have developed over the years.

When someone asked me to do something, I tried to respond quickly. When an opportunity appeared, I took the first step rather than thinking about it for too long.

I learned something simple: action creates feedback.

I could think about something for weeks, but once I acted, reality answered. Something worked or did not work. Someone responded or did not respond. Then I could adjust and act again.

Over time, this became part of how I built trust with people and how I moved my life forward.

Recently, however, I have been thinking about quick action differently.

I am learning what I call the second discipline—slowing down, reducing noise, noticing quieter signals, allowing things to remain unresolved, and sometimes simply waiting.

At first, waiting seemed almost opposite to quick action.

If I am learning not to react immediately, does quick action still have a place?

I think it does.

What has changed is the voice I am responding to.

For much of my life, the voice was often external.

An email arrived. Someone needed something. There was a deadline, an opportunity, a responsibility. I became very good at hearing these voices and responding to them.

But there is another kind of voice that is much quieter.

An idea suddenly comes to mind.

Someone I have not spoken with for years comes into my thoughts.

I feel strangely drawn toward something that was never part of my plan.

A question keeps returning even though there is no practical reason to answer it today.

Nobody is asking me to do anything. There is no deadline. Nobody will be disappointed if I ignore it.

And because of that, these signals are remarkably easy to postpone.

I am beginning to realize that perhaps I need to give these quieter internal signals some of the same responsiveness I have given other people’s requests for decades.

Of course, this does not mean acting on every impulse.

That is where waiting becomes important.

Some thoughts are simply noise. Some come from anxiety, boredom, restlessness, or the desire to escape what I should actually be doing.

So I wait.

I listen.

I allow the thought to return—or disappear.

But when a signal remains and becomes clearer, perhaps that is when my old habit of quick action becomes valuable again.

Take one small step.

Write one page.

Send one message.

Have one conversation.

Explore one possibility.

I do not need to know where it will lead.

In fact, action may itself become part of discernment. Once I take a small step, reality gives me feedback. Perhaps the interest disappears. Perhaps the door closes. Or perhaps something becomes unexpectedly alive.

Then I can listen again.

I used to think waiting and quick action belonged to opposite ways of living.

Now I am beginning to see a different rhythm:

Wait so I can hear.
Discern what deserves attention.
Act so I can learn.
Then listen again.

Quick action is still precious to me.

I am simply learning to respond to a different voice.

Recently, I have noticed that I am becoming less efficient.

For many years, I liked having a clear schedule. I decided what I needed to do, assigned time for it, and tried to follow the plan. If I had three things to accomplish that morning, finishing those three things meant that I had used my time well.

It worked.

That discipline helped me accomplish many things in my life.

But recently, I have been living somewhat differently.

I still have plans, but I do not always force myself to follow them. Sometimes I begin working on one thing, become interested in another thought, start reading something completely different, or simply spend time thinking.

Before I realize it, the original schedule is gone.

Sometimes I look back and think, I wasted a lot of time today.

And perhaps I did.

But something interesting has also been happening.

Occasionally, during those apparently inefficient hours, a new idea emerges. It may have nothing to do with what I originally planned to accomplish that day. Yet sometimes that idea changes how I think about my work, my life, or even the next ten years.

That made me wonder whether there are actually two kinds of efficiency.

The first is execution efficiency:

How much of what I planned did I accomplish today?

I have spent most of my life becoming good at this.

But there may be another kind—directional efficiency:

Am I becoming clearer about what is actually worth doing?

These are not always the same.

I can have an extremely productive day and complete everything on my schedule without ever questioning whether those things are still where I should be putting my energy.

On the other hand, I can have a seemingly unproductive morning in which very little gets completed, yet discover one idea that changes my direction for years.

Of course, this can easily become an excuse for distraction.

Not everything that interrupts my schedule is meaningful. Much of it is simply noise.

So perhaps the deeper challenge is learning to distinguish between:

noise that steals attention

and

signals that deserve attention.

I used to protect my schedule from almost everything that tried to interrupt it.

Now I wonder whether that efficiency sometimes made it harder to hear quieter signals.

A thought that keeps returning.

A conversation that unexpectedly stays with me.

A question that seems unrelated to today’s work but somehow feels important.

An hour when nothing productive seems to happen, yet something inside me is slowly becoming clearer.

Not every signal deserves action. And not every empty hour produces insight.

Maybe that is exactly the point.

If I require every hour to produce something measurable, there is no real open space. I have already decided what that hour is allowed to become.

I still believe in planning. I still need discipline. There are many times when the right thing to do is simply sit down and finish what needs to be finished.

But I am beginning to see that there may also be times when efficiency means something different.

Sometimes the important question is not:

How faithfully did I follow today’s plan?

It is:

Did I leave enough room to notice that my direction itself may be changing?

Perhaps some apparently wasted time is not wasted at all.

It may simply be the space in which a quieter signal finally becomes audible..

For most of my life, there was always a next season waiting.

Finish one stage of training, and begin another.

Complete one challenge, and prepare for the next.

Move to a new place, establish myself, build a career, support a family, develop research, take on more responsibility.

There was rarely much space between seasons.

When one chapter was ending, my instinct was always the same:

What comes next?

Looking back now, I realize how long I have lived this way.

There were difficult seasons when the future was completely unclear. There were years of building, struggling, failing, trying again, and carrying responsibilities that could not simply be put down.

Through all of them, I kept moving.

That way of living served me well.

But recently, a simple thought has begun to emerge:

I did my best with the life I had.

I carried a lot for a long time.

Something inside me becomes quieter when I say those words.

Perhaps I do not need to keep running.

Not forever.

Just for a while.

I have always thought of transitions as something to move through efficiently.

Old season.

Transition.

New season.

The transition itself seemed like a hallway connecting two important rooms. The goal was to move through it and discover what came next.

But perhaps I have misunderstood transition.

Perhaps the space between seasons is not merely a passage.

Perhaps it is a season of its own.

A season when I do not need to know what comes next.

This kind of space can initially feel uncomfortable.

After decades of pursuing goals, an empty field looks like land waiting to be cultivated.

Our instinct is to plant immediately.

Another project.

Another responsibility.

Another purpose.

Another big tree.

But farmers understand something that achievement-oriented people can easily forget.

Sometimes the field needs to rest.

During that time, the land may appear unproductive.

Yet beneath the surface, something is happening.

The soil is recovering.

Old material is becoming nourishment.

The ground is quietly preparing for whatever season comes next.

Perhaps human life needs the same thing.

There may already be seeds scattered around us.

Some may grow.

Some may not.

We do not need to decide immediately which one should become the next great tree.

Perhaps that is precisely the temptation we need to resist.

For the first time, I am beginning to understand that completion does not require an immediate new beginning.

There can simply be space.

And after spending much of life learning how to run, build, achieve, and carry responsibility, perhaps another discipline is waiting for us.

To stop.

To receive.

To notice.

To allow the soil to recover.

To trust that something can be happening even when nothing appears to be happening.

The field can rest.

And so can I.

The next season will come when it comes.

There is no need to pull spring toward us.

For now, perhaps there is enough life in simply being here—in the quiet, fertile space between seasons.

For much of life, we live in front of an audience.

Sometimes the audience is real.

Teachers evaluate us.

Employers evaluate us.

Colleagues notice our performance.

Society rewards achievement.

People praise us when we succeed and criticize us when we fail.

Over time, however, something interesting happens.

Even when the audience is no longer physically present, we carry it inside us.

We begin asking:

What will people think?

Will anyone appreciate what I did?

Do they understand how much I contributed?

Will this change how they see me?

Without realizing it, part of our life becomes a performance.

Then one day, we may encounter a painful realization:

No one cares about me.

At first, those words sound terribly lonely.

But perhaps they are not quite true.

There are people who genuinely love us.

The deeper truth is simpler:

People are mostly living their own lives.

They have their own problems.

Their own families.

Their own ambitions.

Their own disappointments.

The event that occupies our mind for hours may occupy theirs for only a few minutes.

Something we desperately want others to understand may barely cross their thoughts.

Initially, this realization can hurt.

But then something unexpected happens.

It becomes freedom.

I don’t need everyone to notice me.

I do not need to explain every misunderstanding.

I do not need everyone to recognize my contribution.

I do not need to correct every opinion.

I do not need applause to confirm that something was worthwhile.

And once the audience becomes quieter, a much more interesting question appears:

What would I do if nobody were watching?

Would I still write if only a few people read it?

Would I still pursue a question simply because I am curious?

Would I spend an afternoon talking with someone I love if nothing productive came from it?

Would I exercise without recording the result?

Would I sit beside the water and watch birds if there were no photograph to share?

Would I help someone if nobody ever knew that I had helped?

These questions reveal something that achievement cannot.

They reveal what is internally valuable to us.

Perhaps this is one of the transitions of a mature life.

For many years, external recognition helps guide us. It gives feedback, creates opportunities, and motivates improvement.

But eventually we may need another compass.

Not:

Will this be noticed?

But:

Does this feel worth doing even if it is never noticed?

And perhaps something even deeper happens after that.

When I no longer need another person’s recognition, I become freer to see that person.

I can listen without demonstrating my knowledge.

I can mentor without needing to appear wise.

I can give someone else an opportunity without feeling diminished.

I can help without keeping track of what comes back.

Contribution becomes cleaner.

Less transactional.

More freely given.

Perhaps this is what I would call pure contribution.

The journey may therefore begin with a painful thought:

No one cares about me.

Then reality softens it:

People are mostly living their own lives.

And freedom follows:

I don’t need everyone to notice me.

Then comes alignment:

What would I do if nobody were watching?

And finally:

I can give without needing something back.

Perhaps becoming less important in other people’s eyes is not something to fear.

It may be one of the ways we finally become free enough to live—and give—from who we truly are.