Be Satisfied with Your Personal Pursuits—Oct. 20
October 20, 2024
Sunday SAGe Newsletter Volume 5: Be Satisfied with Your Personal Pursuits
Happy Sunday!
Here is this week’s installment of Sunday SAGe, an email communication that shares wellness inspiration from The Wellness Ethic to help people thrive. As background, SAGe is an acronym for Self-Actualized Genius (your best self). To learn more about being a SAGe, you can access my blog article: On Being a Self-Actualized Genius (SAGe).
Be Satisfied with Your Personal Pursuits
An excerpt from The Wellness Ethic:
You engage in personal pursuits for enjoyment or personal enrichment rather than to fulfill work or other responsibilities. The list of what you can pursue is only restricted by the limits of your imagination. To get the most satisfaction out of your experiences, try the following:
Mindfully engage in what you do. Deeply appreciate your partner throughout a date night and emotionally connect with why you love them. Take a nature walk and engage your senses with everything you encounter. Go to a restaurant and soak in the experience—the ambience, food, companionship, and the staff’s hustle.
Increase the challenge with what you pursue—develop mastery. Strive to set a personal record (PR) in an eighteen-round of golf (for me, a PR would be to hit fewer than four people with an errant golf ball). Join a recreational sports league. Take classes in something that you love. Become a buff (Civil War, Disney, classic cars). Perfect your own brand of home brew.
Diversify a pursuit. Experiment with different kinds of meditation. Start a blog or podcast around a passion. Read books from unfamiliar genres. Sample music or poetry from diverse cultures.
Add other loves to a pursuit to multiply the love. Instead of exercising by yourself, exercise with a friend. Take a dance class with your partner. Listen to a podcast on a subject you love as you do housework, drive, or go for a walk. Travel with a group of friends. Organize a charity softball tournament.
Pursue something you have never done before. Take scuba diving lessons. Volunteer in a foreign country. Go to an opera. Visit the Galapagos Islands. Learn how to play the bagpipes. Try a new water sport. Go to Burning Man. Learn how to paint. Start a garden.
With personal pursuits, the world is your oyster. How will you slurp that gift?
What It Means
Your time and resources are finite. How can you get the most joy and fulfillment out of every precious day on this planet? Do you want to try something new? Something off the wall? Do you want to spend a Saturday afternoon losing yourself in a Ken Follett paperback? Or do you want to scale back on a current activity because it’s not giving you enough joy?
Seek experiences that make you feel alive; experiences that create love. You’ll look forward to those experiences. You’ll love the moment you’re in. You’ll create memories that can last a lifetime. It’s all upside!
Your Call to Action
Think about approaching this week differently than you may have in the past. How can you intentionally craft a week full of experiences that engage your senses and make you grateful to be alive? The week doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. Do things—big or small—that bring love and joy into your life. Then reflect upon how the week went. Do you want more weeks like that?
Have an engaging week!
