It has been a weird year. Not a difficult one… but a weird one.  It started off well, busy with work and life.  Happy. Content.

Easy.

I started going to the gym regularly, hiring a personal trainer to ensure that I showed up.  Slowly things started improving.

Things continued to be good.

Easy.

I made more positive changes to life, and work, and kept rolling. I would get up, work hard, play lots, and go to bed.

Only to do it again the next day.

Routine.

I would have conversations with friends deeply immersed in their start ups. They would talk about lying awake at night, their brain refusing to turn off.  The ups and downs, the highs and lows.

And I would smile and nod and say, I remember those days.

I found myself complaining to my friends, that things were easy. I felt like a fool, like an ungrateful fool. How DARE I complain that things are going well. That things are EASY?

But things were easy. And I don’t do easy.

I once had a friend tell me “Balance is boring”.  I confidently disagreed with her back then, desperately striving for a taste of balance, but these days I understand the angle she was coming from.

ROUTINE can be boring. EASE can get boring (it is nice in small doses).  We need the BIG UPS and the Downs to keep is working on improving and finding solutions and celebrating. We need these highs and lows to keep us inspired.

We need failures to value success.

So, this month has been all about shaking things up.  Tackling hard questions about what I can do to make life LESS EASY.  Choosing more challenges paths, taking bigger risks.  Exploring new ideas.

I am passionate about what I do, and how I live and I want to retain that passion and constantly move forward on a journey… not stand still in a perfect moment of time.

So thank you, all of you who listened to me whine and helped regain my energy. To those who SHOOK ME AWAKE and reminded me that we need to continually reinvent. We need to challenge ourselves and take risks.  That I’m not done yet.

And so the journey continues. . . .