“Sometimes it takes the darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
”
Six months. We are six months into a pandemic that has transformed our lives. For many of us, it’s been a time of darkness and aloneness.
For most of us, it has also contained moments of joy, connection, insight, and growth. For all the hardships this pandemic has wrought, most people have been adaptable, resilient, and strong. We’ve strengthened bonds with the people we love. We’ve learned to live and work in the new normal.
Many people are also thinking deeply about what they want their lives to look like after the pandemic. I hear it from some of my clients. They do not want to go back to the “old normal” when many of them were over-scheduled, overworked, and overwhelmed. As one client told me, “The Covid shutdowns have taught me that rest is good, hyper busy is bad.”
Over and over in the past couple of months, clients have said that they want to work with me on implementing strategies to free themselves from obligations and commitments that drain their energy and distract them. As another client put it, “I want to do things that align with my ‘why.’” He meant that he wants to spend his time, life’s most precious gift, on activities that align with his reason for being, his sense of purpose in the world.
One way that some people hope to achieve that better alignment is through a change in their work lives. Several people I know are contemplating career shifts. They aren’t alone. A new survey from AllBright, a network of professional women, found that more than 60% of women are planning some kind of career pivot. This startling figure suggests to me that the women surveyed have used the pandemic to reflect on what they really want in their lives and their careers and taking action to better align all aspects of their lives to the things they value most.
I’ve been doing that kind of thinking, too. This fall, as life has started to ramp back up, I’m making a concerted effort to curate my life. “Curate” is a term that is often used in the museum world. A curator selects, organizes, cares for, and presents the items in a museum collection.
The curator cannot collect everything. The museum’s mission provides the curator with parameters for what she will or won’t collect for the museum. For example, the curator at a historical museum can’t collect every available item from history. She would never have sufficient resources to acquire everything nor space to store it. She has to be selective, acquiring things that relate specifically to the museum’s thematic focus (the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, for example) or the geographic area it serves (such as the South Carolina State Museum) or a particular time period or event (like the National World War II Museum). The curator has to collect the best examples of a particular item or the objects that best illustrate some past event.
In spite of their best efforts, museums often find themselves with an accumulation of items that aren’t appropriate for their collections. Maybe a well-meaning individual donated a group of items that were barely related to the museum’s mission. Maybe the museum’s focus shifted. Those items may be valuable, but they are not useful to this particular museum. Periodically, museum curators do an assessment of the museum’s total collection and de-accession some items that are taking up space in the collection without contributing much to the museum’s programming.
Curation is a powerful metaphor for thinking about the things (and people) we want to make room for in our lives. I am trying to carefully curate the things that take up space in my life, focusing on the people, commitments, and things that bring me alive. I’m also trying to carefully de-accession commitments and obligations that may be important but may not align with my “why.”
What about you? How do you want to curate your life and what do you need to de-accession?