This time of year is busy for so many of us. For those who are in school, or who have children in school, May’s calendar is filled with projects, field trips, banquets, and upcoming graduations for many. While many of these events are exciting and anticipated, they require a lot of work. In addition, there are additional tasks and chores year-round that require our focus.

In her blog post “When You Need to Slow Down but It’s Hard,” Margarita Tartakovsky empathizes with her readers regarding the pressure to stay busy and accomplish a multitude of items each day. She challenges the tendency of society to “glorify efficiency and exhaustion.”

Tartakovsky then shares a list of questions from a book entitled “Nurturing the Soul of Your Family: 10 Ways to Reconnect and Find Peace in Everyday Life” by Ren’ee Peterson Trudeau. These questions include:

• What choices can I make every day to feel more grounded, relaxed, and focused?
• What can I do to live intentionally?
• At the beginning of every day, what can I do to feel more centered?
• What self-care practices add spaciousness to my days?
• What can I say ‘no’ to in my professional and personal life?
• How can I support my loved ones in being less busy?
• Am I getting sucked into someone else’s “busy-ness” and sense of urgency? Or am I staying true to what’s important to me?
• What decisions do I need to make in order to create more blocks of unscheduled time in my days?

Tartakovsky closes her post by sharing the following thoughts:

“Maybe the answer is to regularly ask ourselves these questions. Maybe the answer is to keep reminding ourselves that to-do lists will never empty, which means that in order to slow down, in order to really rest, we need to make the commitment. We need to say, it’s enough, and we’re enough. And we need to carve out time and honor that time like it’s precious. Because it is. And because we are.”