Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Dealing with "shoulds"

As some of you know, I was on vacation last week, enjoying the beauty and peacefulness of Provincetown, MA (I took the photo above from the wharf, on our last night there).

It rained the first few days, so we did a lot of sitting around and reading. I picked up a work of fiction that I had brought from home. With the exception of a book of short stories, this was the first fiction that I read in quite awhile as most of my reading energy had been focused on school (and with what was left, I typically chose magazines). Anyway, those first few days, I heard this voice in my head saying "you should read something educational." I don't usually have a lot of "should" voices in my head, particularly on vacation.. I'm pretty good at relaxing. But there I was, telling myself that I should be reading something "useful." (FYI, of course I think there is value in good fiction!).

Well, I finally talked myself out of that "should" debate and enjoyed the book. The whole thing led me to wonder, what other "shoulds" do I have floating around in my head that just aren't useful? How about you? Any "shoulds" that are getting in the way? Can you pick one "should" that you want to commit to leave behind?

cheers
Harriet

No comments:

Post a Comment

Creative Commons License
The Encouragement Lounge by Harriet L. Schwartz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.