I Need to Lift My Bucket

I am a city-girl, which probably makes me the least qualified person to talk about bulldozers. But I am going to anyway because the image just won’t leave me. I was sipping a nonfat latte in the new downtown Starbucks last week, in my city-girl dress and matching boots (see, completely unqualified). I was catching up with a friend, and without a thought in my head I told him, “I feel like a bulldozer.”

I’ve got my bucket to the ground, full of all the things that matter most to me in my life. And I am pushing forward. I'm gradually making progress with my family, my career, and my dreams. I am so happy—fulfilled, really.  But it’s a lot to manage sometimes. As I am pushing forward with it all, I am beginning to notice a wall forming in front of me.

My bucket is scraping the ground.

I'm trying to carry everything that's important to me in one large load. I am moving dirt around, when what I need to do is break things down into more reasonable loads. Prioritize. Strategize. God help me, I need to begin clarifying the blueprints of my Plan B. If I don’t manage the enormity of my dreams and responsibilities, the wall of dirt growing in front of me will just keep getting bigger until it stops me in my tracks.

I need to lift my bucket.

I need just a few inches of margin...to sift out what’s important versus what is vital. I need to give myself permission to let a few things fall through the cracks. I must accept that by design, my bucket was built to carry a certain load. As I push forward in life, all the responsibilities I collect beyond my capacity will continue to pile up in front of me until they bury me under the pile of stress and pressure I allowed myself to take on.

Lifting my bucket means more than time-management. It means value-management. |Click to Tweet| It means identifying what is most valuable to me in this season, and pushing forward with purpose and determination to see those things through. Simultaneously, lifting my bucket means creating a few inches of margin in my life so I don't burn out—pushing against a wall of responsibility that's bigger than I am.

Having it all doesn't mean doing it all at once. Rather, a life fully lived is built when we fill our buckets with what we value most...and we give ourselves margins to let the lesser things sift through.