Tag: discipline

What the Fuck? I’m Only Paid for 40 (Or, Choosing Time Over Money at Forty-Something)

Twenty years on, the same core values look completely different in practice – a reflection on career pivots, nieces I don’t see enough, and why 70-hour weeks stopped being worth it.

Fifth stop on Brigid’s Path this round, and this one’s less about a single moment. The Path Forward is hugely important on Brigid’s Path. And I keep. On. Coming. Back. To it. (Step one, two, three, and four linked!) Not once, not twice – constantly. Life changes, so the path changes, so here we are again.

A representation of my working week in a spreadsheet, with colour coded meetings showing in a chart but all the info stripped out. I have a path forward that hopefully has fewer meetings in it!
Yes I’m sad enough to have an outline of my week…. and yes the colours do mean things. Anyone working in a manufacturing envorinoment will recognise the signs of a tier system at play here! If you don’t – don’t worry. You’re not missing out.

What is a path, anyway?

A connection between two places or states. A search. A story. A call. A feeling.

And also – hard work. Bloody hard work. I say that because it’s true, and because it’s the bit that gets left out of most spiritual writing. Nobody puts “hard work” on the inspirational quote graphic, but there it is, plain as anything, sitting underneath every other definition. And we’re looking towards the path forward on Brigid’s Path, it nearly always contains hard work!

Why do I keep revisiting this bit?

Because I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago, and my path is looking different because of it.

A few years ago I couldn’t have thought about the thing I’m actually thinking about now – a pivot in my engineering career, away from day-to-day manufacturing support and towards more of a consultancy role, or something global. That wasn’t even a shape my ambition could take back then. But as I get older, I want different things from life.

Oh how myphysical body has changed! My emotional body has changed. My spiritual body has changed. The core values are the same – they haven’t moved – but how I express them definitely has.

I have two nieces I want to spend more time with. I have friends and family I don’t see enough of. Seventy-hour weeks are no longer appealing. Like, what the fuck? I’m only paid for 40. Why am I giving away an extra 75% for free?

Time is far more important now than money, fundamentally. And that’s reflected in the path I’m choosing for myself.

Guides, torchbearers, and pathfinders

These are job descriptions, not descriptions of a person or entity. They might be friends, teachers, authors, voices from the past, deities, saints, things beyond definition. Almost certainly, they will offer suggestions. They can show you the path they walked and how it might help you. They might shed light on a particular aspect of your spiritual path, or they might be extremely specific, or extremely general.

And, honestly, they might not always be what you need. That’s allowed too.

I know Mary, St Therese of Lisieux, Mary Magdalene and all the rest are there for me. But those relationships ebb and flow. There will be times when this work is the most important work you can be doing. And others when it’s really far down the list, because other things are more important. Most of us don’t have the need, want, or wherewithal to devote our entire lives to our spirituality. We find the spiritual in the mundane. And that’s ok as well. It’s always ok.

What is right for you?

Well. That’s for you to decide.

Some questions worth sitting with, if you want a starting point: What values and beliefs are most important to me now? What positive aspects of my previous experience do I want to carry forward? Am I afraid of changing direction, and how do I address that? What practices actually align with what I believe, rather than what I think I should believe?

You’ll notice some overlap with questions I’ve asked in earlier posts on this path. That’s fine. This is about revisiting them now that you’ve done more of the work.

How to keep yourself safe while you’re figuring this out

Set your boundaries. Pay attention to your internal and external feelings, not just one or the other. Know your own lore – the story you’ve already lived, not just the one you’re being sold. Ask questions, and actually assess the answers instead of accepting the first one that sounds nice. And ask the same question again and again until you’re actually happy with the answer, not just tired of asking it.

So where does my path forward actually go?

I don’t fully know yet, if I’m honest. But I know it’s away from where I’ve been standing for the last while, and towards more time, not more money. Away from the version of me that thought 70-hour weeks were just what committed people did, and towards a version that gets to see her nieces more.

That’s the path forward, as far as I can see it right now. It’ll probably look different again in another 20 years. Good.

Bounce Around Like an Eejit: Joy as Discipline

Why joy isn’t something that just happens to you — the research behind planning for it, ten minutes a day on a trampoline, and Joy’s place as step three on Brigid’s Path.

After the depressing events of the last two weeks, this week I want to talk about Joy. Yes – ye are following me through this iteration of walking Brigid’s Path. I’d say sorry, but I’m really not. Sometimes you get the bad and the ugly before the good comes along.

Me at the beach, in the wind, experiencing some joy. Also my hair all over my face! Sometimes joy as a daily practice takes effort!

I love trampolining. And ok, it requires some hefty underwear – an F cup could blacken my own eye if I’m not careful – but that’s beside the point. Once the damn thing was up (again, so sorry about that day, neighbours), it was a lot easier to go and play on it. But easier isn’t the same as easy.

I bet ye can all guess how my mind was working once I got that trampoline up. What a waste of money. Grown woman playing on a trampoline. What will people think. It’s not like it’s doing any good. And on, and on, and on. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But joy isn’t always about the immediate effects. And sometimes the shadow work isn’t about digging through what’s gone wrong – sometimes it’s about being disciplined enough to actually let joy into your life, instead of quietly ignoring it.

I have a firm belief that no matter what put us on this earth, or why we’re here, we don’t have to be bloody miserable all the time. There’s real research behind that too – Barbara Fredrickson’s “broaden-and-build” theory in psychology argues that positive emotions aren’t just pleasant, they actually build real psychological resources over time: resilience, creativity, the ability to problem-solve. Joy isn’t just a nice feeling. It’s functional. And one well-known long-running study of a group of nuns found that those who expressed more positive emotion in early adulthood went on to live measurably longer than their less expressive peers.

But somehow, along the way, we all got the notion that joy is childish, or immature, or just not part of daily life as an adult. And there are times I wonder who or what benefits from that. (No, no – not me buying into conspiracy theories about capitalism, particularly late-stage capitalism… of course not. Dopamine produced by spending money is just as good as any other kind.)

It’s a hard nut to crack for most of us. Even those deep into sport aren’t immune – the Mayo football team just won the All-Ireland after 75 years, a story big enough to make the New York Times (albeit behind a paywall, but seriously – loads of free stuff on the net about it), but that was 75 years of loss for the fans first. A curse, they called it. That’s all over now. So no, nothing – or hardly anything – is guaranteed to give us joy. But from reading the literature, I’ve found that building habits that lead to joy can.

This all ended in me actually being disciplined about joy. Sounds antithetical, right? But looking at the research – and trust me, I’ve looked at the research – there’s nothing that says joy is spontaneous. In fact, a lot of what’s suggested – a daily walk, noticing nature, watching comedy – kind of needs to be planned for most of us. So I had to plan this too.

I committed to ten minutes a day. Hail, rain, or shine – and honestly, even getting onto the damn thing in the rain is fun enough. Certainly it was for someone watching me. But I decided: ten minutes, usually in the morning, for joy. And ok, it wasn’t the trampoline every day – sometimes the rain really was too much, so I danced for ten minutes instead. (Yes. We’re back to Shakira again.)

I get it – joy and discipline don’t really mix in our modern world. But there’s joy in mastering a new skill, and mastery takes practice. Not to mention repetition. Going back to something I’ve mentioned before about food – there’s joy in producing my own food too. By which I mean buying it and cooking it, not growing it. Taking the time to put love into what goes into my belly. A homemade fajita isn’t the same as an authentic Mexican dish, and it’s not trying to be. But it means I’m valuing myself enough to actually feed myself properly.

We overlook joy far too often. And it’s so important, it’s step three on Brigid’s Path. It’s not about being constantly happy – it’s about getting regular injections of joy into our lives. And sometimes that means heading out on a cold morning to bounce around like an eejit for a few minutes, before putting on your serious face and heading into the world to adult.