You Can't Have It All, but You Can Have This.
The Practice #2 Discern.
Welcome back to the Practice.
The Practice is where I share the best tools, exercises, and practices I’ve discovered in over 20 years of professional coaching. These simple practices will support you to make small, positive changes that create transformative impacts over time.
Our goal is simple - to support you to live life at your pace, on your terms, pursuing the things that matter most to you.
My goal is to build a Community of Slow Sip Practitioners who can engage here and offer each other encouragement, support, and accountability.
Let’s get started.
Our practice this month is Discern.
More than almost any other skill, discernment holds the key to living a fulfilling life on your terms and at your pace. Building and honing this skill, enables you to create more space for what matters most by identifying and minimizing the things that matter less.
To reap the benefits of discernment, it helps to embrace this simple truth.
Reflect: You can’t have it all.
At the core of my being, I know this to be true.
But my puppy mind doesn’t buy it for one minute.
It wants to run around and explore everything, gobble up things it shouldn’t, and pee in all the wrong places. My puppy mind is not discerning. Often, in its rush to chase the newest bright shiny object, it blows right past my heart. That quiet chamber where I find what really matters.
Developing the skill of discernment begins with listening deeply to your heart and what it wants. Understanding at the core what gives your life meaning and what really matters to you.
Discernment is also an art. An art that is practiced by staying true to your sense of purpose, while, at the same time, opening your internal aperture to the unexpected gifts of everyday delight and awe.
No one says this better than poet, Barbara Ras in her breathtaking poem, You Can’t Have It All. The poem tells us, “you can't have it all, but there is this.” It is a masterclass in the art of attention and discernment. Give yourself a few precious moments with this poem and what it can show you about attending to what truly matters.
This month, I invite you to practice two paths of discernment:
The skill to detect signal from noise, to strip away the superfluous – to dig beneath the rubble of the trivial to the warm glow of the essential.
The art to discern the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miracle in everyday things, through a simple but beautiful daily delight practice, which I will share below.
.
Special thanks and acknowledgement to
from Writing in The Dark for introducing me to Ross Gay’s, The Book of Delights that inspired this practice. If your dream is to become the best writer you can be, I can think of no better place to start than Writing in the Dark.