I have come to accept that life is just stressful. I’m always going to be busy. I’m always going to feel overwhelmed. I’m always going to be stressed. However, I have never really thought about why. Why does life have to be that stressful? I have always believed that you should spend your life doing things you love despite what people say. I have always lived by that. Yet, my life is still stressful and I still feel overwhelmed all the time. So when we started studying Emmerson and Thoreau in class, I started thinking and questioning if I was, in fact, right. I have come to the conclusion that you can’t always do whatever you want. Sometimes in life you have to do the things you don’t necessarily want to do. Sometimes you have to say no.

Even though we’d like to, we can’t always just do whatever we want. If you have a great passion for watching Netflix, that’s all you want to do all day. However, you can’t just watch Netflix all day because it is what you love to do. You have other things you need to do. You need to go to work and make house payments. You need to feed yourself and your family. These may not be things you want to do but you have to do them if you are going to continue to watch Netflix in your free time. This applies to life in general as well. You may need to spend part of your life doing things that you don’t want to do. However, that is what you have to do if you are going to have the rewards. Spending your life just doing whatever you want is not going to work. Eventually life is going to catch up to you.

You can’t always say yes to everything. Doing all of the things you love at once may seem like a good idea, but trust me, it isn’t. There have been times in my life that I have been involved in 5+ activities that I love. For example; freshman year of high school. I was involved in several clubs and had an adequate amount of homework. I wasn’t very stressed so I decided it would be fine for me to audition for a play at the same time as my golf season. Needless to say, I had a very rough time.  I loved the time I spent doing each activity but eventually it all caught up with me. I put so much effort into everything that I was doing, that I became mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted. If I had just said no to a couple of things I would have been much better off. When you are doing that many things at once and trying to juggle school or work with it, you don’t feel very accomplished in anything you are doing. You feel like you are giving 50% to all of the things you are doing when you could be giving 100% if you had just a few less commitments. So, yes, you can technically say yes to everything but that does not mean you should. You are going to wear yourself down until you can’t go anymore. Sometimes the best thing to do is just say no, even if it is the last thing you want to do.

Living your life with simplicity can create a feeling of peace. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.” (Walden). Our lives get so busy because of all the things we have to do. If you were to stop and ask yourself, “Is this something I need to do, or is it something I want to do?”, what would your answer be? Odds are, the thing that is stressing you out and making your life so busy, is something that you chose to do, not that you need to do. If you were to eliminate some of the things that were making you so busy, your life would be a lot simpler. By eliminating something that makes your life so busy, you would also be eliminating the stress caused by it. It is pretty much a given that the less stress in your life, the more peaceful it can be. You are in charge of your peace, “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” (Emmerson).  Get on the road to simplicity, and you will be on the road to peace within yourself.

Eliminating stress in your life is harder than it looks. I am a very busy person and I am very aware that I say “yes” to too much. I am stressed out 85% of the time. The 15% of the time that I’m not stressed out, I don’t even let myself relax. I usually spend that time planning what I have/want to do next. I never just stop and take a break. Shouldn’t that be sign enough that I need to back up? That is the point where I should just  look at myself in the mirror and say “Stop. Backup and take a breath.”  Everyone should learn to live in the moment a little more than they do. I know that if I learned to live in the moment more, I would probably have a slap of realization that sometimes I need to say “no”. Living in the moment for me would lead to a not-as-busy life, less stress, and more peace.

So now the question is, is this really as easy as it sounds? The answer: no it isn’t. Saying no to things you love to do will never be easy.  However, you can’t do whatever you want all the time. You need to figure out what things are important and what aren’t. Making your life simpler won’t happen with the click of button but it can happen. You just need to learn to live in the moment and how to use the word no. You can try to do it all but when it comes to the end of the day, you can’t. It just won’t work out. Trying to do everything you want to do all at once would be like trying to catch 100 golf balls in a cup that only holds five. You would succesfully catch 5 but the other 95 would go rolling out of control. Just like in life, you can try to juggle everything but in the end everything will just go rolling out of control.