Filling your jar

We’ve all heard the analogy about your life being a jar, right? You have rocks, pebbles and sand and you have to fit it all into your jar of life. The rocks represent the most important or meaningful things in your life like family, health, and career goals. The pebbles represent smaller but still important things like hobbies or social activities. And the sand represents all of the other stuff in life, the mindless time wasting stuff. If you were to put the sand in the jar first, there’s no room for the rocks. Well, when I was a young mom just starting out as a SAHM, it was relatively easy to prioritize the big stuff. I had my life wide open to schedule things as I needed. My kids were the rocks, of course. They were first. Everything I did was scheduled around their needs. Next came the pebbles - the household duties - the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, errands, scheduling kids appointments and activities, and in my case, the household finances. And the sand in the jar was the fun stuff for either just myself or for the family, and that just fit right into the empty spaces easily.

I was thinking about that analogy this morning as I was on my morning walk with Frankie. Here at the beach, most of the houses have rocks in their yards instead of grass. But there are all different sizes of rocks, from tiny pebbles to fist-sized rocks. Just seeing all the different sizes today made me realize that I’ve completely lost track of my jar! I haven’t re-organized my jar since my kids were young and that’s really not healthy. The two biggest rocks, my two girls, aren’t even in my jar anymore. They’re still in my life, of course, but their day-to-day activities aren’t my responsibility anymore. And yet here I am just recognizing that I’ve backfilled their space in my jar with just sand and pebbles. I needed to fill that space with other big rocks first and I didn’t. I think it’s time to dump out my metaphorical jar and figure this shit out. Like now.

If I’m being honest, I lost a lot of myself when my girls left home, as a lot of SAHM’s do. When your purpose is your kids and your kids grow up and leave, then what? For me, I hit perimenopause right at the same time as my oldest daughter, Maddie, graduated high school in 2014. It was a perfect storm of anxiety, depression, mood swings, weight gain, and 21-day cycles. It was very easy to fall out of the gym routine that I had been in for years, and fall right into a sedentary lifestyle without the girls to drag me from activity to activity. Add into that the stress of people expecting me to suddenly have an entirely new career or life already planned out and ready to leap into now that I was an “empty nester” which is a title I didn’t feel prepared for and didn’t really want. My head was spinning, even though from the day your kids are born, their 18th birthday is some sort of milestone that every parent has circled on the calendar. Let me tell you - you still never see it coming.

So now that I’m here, nearly 11 years past that date, and despite the countless times I’ve told myself “I really need to figure out what to do with my life,” it never dawned on me until today that I backfilled my damn jar with sand. So it’s time to re-assess my priorities. So If I’m re-organizing my jar, what are my rocks now? What are my pebbles? And what is my sand?

• Rocks

  • family time / beach house

  • walking

  • strength training

  • household finances

  • business tasks

  • Frankie

  • reading

• Pebbles

  • cooking / baking

  • cultivating friendships

  • newsletter / writing

• Sand

  • scrolling

My biggest obstacle will be my Kindle! I don’t want to demote reading from a rock to a pebble, but I’m putting it at the bottom of the rock pile. It has to come last, not first. I need to leave the Kindle out of my bedroom - it can’t be the last thing I touch at night nor the first thing I touch in the morning. Most people say this about their phones, but my problem is my Kindle. There are worse problems to have, sure, but I need to prioritize getting out of bed and moving before I let myself get lost in a book for 3-4 hours a day. What’s your biggest obstacle?

So there’s my project as I head into the month of May - getting my metaphorical jar sorted out. It’s a good time of year to sort your jar if it’s been a while since you’ve done it. So get comfy, and dump out your jar in your mind onto a big blanket. Picture it. Sift out the big rocks and the pebbles, sort through them, feel them in your hands, let them sit with you for a while and see if they still hold value for you. The jar doesn’t change throughout your life - it’s always the same size - so the rocks, pebbles and sand are what have to change, not the jar. Fill it wisely, my friends!

Love, Karen