It’s 6:20 am on the Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend and our smoke alarms start to go off, going from the chirp (indicate needing a battery replacement), to a full on scream to let us know there may be a fire present. You have all been there and know that it is impossible to sleep through such noise and quite frankly, it’s alarming, as it’s intended to be. And because situations like this occur at the most inconvenient times, my 4-year-old and I were up trying to remedy the issue, as my husband was out-of-town for the weekend. Although this was a minor inconvenience and some lost hours of sleep, it made me think about how easy it is to go about life in the same manner regarding some our most important values as we do our smoke detectors. I would have to guess that at least 50% of the population are not proactive about replacing their smoke alarm batteries once a year as recommended. They, like we did, wait until they start to hear a chirp, that annoys them enough to fix the issue. That being said, not one of us can deny the importance of these little devices to ensure that we are safe, but ignore them until they are an inconvenience to us.
In the same way most of us don’t replace our batteries in our smoke detectors once a year, we seemingly go through life without regularly re-assessing where we currently are and what improvements need to be made to keep our most important values in life, working well and thriving. However, one thing that always comes to mind is the principle that nothing ever remains the same. At any given moment, we or anything else in life, is either getting better or worse. Stagnation doesn’t exist, we live in a world of constant decay or improvement. If we don’t take care of our relationships or our health, they are on the decline. It may be a slow decline, but it is a decline. I have done this in several areas along the way. From not nurturing certain relationships, to not feeding my own marriage enough, the beeps have gone off on both, alarming me that I need to feed those areas before they experience an even greater decline.
Sometimes, it’s a quiet chirp, every so often, one that you hear and know that it needs to be tended to, but not enough to change or address right away. You may even claim that you don’t hear a chirp, but there are always little signs of which direction your life is going in regards to relationships, your health or any other area of importance. In this high pace culture we live in, it’s easy to not slow down enough to notice these signs, but they are there as important feedback if you take a moment to notice.
One experience that comes to mind as I reflect on my life when I didn’t respect the signs of where my body was at and ignored my intuition, is when I blew my knee out. This was one of my greatest wake up calls, after not listening to the small voice inside of me that told me that I was too tired to go skiing. I had over trained the day before and I kept second guessing my decision to go skiing, but ultimately ignored my inner chirp/voice that was warning me not to go on that certain day back in January of 2009. And because I decided I needed to tough it out and go, on my third run of that morning, my ski tips crossed, kept crossing, until I heard 2 distinct pops, indicating I had annihilated my knee. That was the last time I ignored my inner chirp/voice.
Whether it be your relationship that hasn’t been fed and in only a matter of time is about to fall apart, or you’ve ignored your body’s demand for quality food for too many years and are on the brink of type 2 diabetes or a heart attack, every seemingly little decision you make on a daily basis can lead to a major consequence down the road. Are the, “small choices” that you make every day leading you to the destination you want to go? As I mentioned before, sometimes we feel as though we don’t hear a “chirp” alarming us to pay attention to these important things and one day the big event occurs; the divorce, the bankruptcy, the heart attack, the loss of a loved one that we last spoke to in a disagreeable manner, etc.. The most important underpinnings that guide your life are your core values. Ask yourself this: are your core values in you life on the decline or are they improving?
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