Chances are you are one of the many to live life sometimes at a higher pace and intensity than you’d prefer. Time doesn’t slow down unless we make it, and even so, we already find ourselves in the second quarter of the year, probably asking where the first three months went.
I often give my clients inventory exercises to do. It allows you to pause, distance yourself to gain better visibility and accurate perception of things around you and about you that you might have otherwise overlooked – so as to not be like fish unaware of the ocean in which they live.
‘Taking inventory of the company you keep’ is about looking at your environment and assessing it, questioning it. Except that it’s multi-layered, intricate in its impact and that for most, you think you have none too limited power over it. So let’s break it down and start with the fact that what surrounds you has an influence on you: you may be conscious about it or not, it might be positive, neutral or negative.
As a starting point, let’s assume you’d like to become aware and recognise the nature of your environment. To structure it, I suggest you begin with what’s the furthest away from you to what’s the closest (or the opposite). I’ll give you some examples to help it land.
Ask yourself about:
- The country and culture you live in. For instance, after years of living in Australia, I left permanently because it no longer felt it was the right place for me to be.
- The area where you live.
- The places you go to (restaurants, activities, outings, etc.). Do you go there by choice, by habit, because your friends go there, because it’s trendy, because it’s convenient, maybe you’ve never asked yourself that question before, etc.?
- What you do with your time. Where you spend it and on what.
- What and where you shop – physically or online. Why?
- The transport you use.
- The home you live in, what and who is in it with you, what and who surrounds it. That aspect alone is a monumental topic which could have its own dedicated article.
- The place(s) where you work, the people you work with, the type of work you do.
- Your relationships – from the distant ones to the closest ones, including friends, family, colleagues, pets.
- The clothes you wear, the skincare you use, the cleaning products you use, the fragrances you use (for you, for your space).
- The food you eat and what you drink.
For each, you’re going to find out if it affects you and if so, how.
And so, for each, ask yourself:
- Does it match my needs, requirements, my innate nature?
- Is it fulfilling and uplifting?
- Is it supportive? Is it serving me, my goals?
- How does it make me feel?
- Is this a choice or does it feel like a constraint?
- Do I feel I have freedom and agency about it or not?
- Do I care?
- What are my true thoughts and beliefs about it?
- If I could have it my way, would it be different? How so?
- What’s my level of sensitivity, what’s my range?
- If you’re allergic to cats, you can’t have a housemate who owns a cat or rent an Airbnb where a cat lives some time of the year.
Let’s agree that this isn’t an easy exercise, that it can be confronting and that you may want to pick one area to start with (e.g. your home) and progress from there.
Why is all this important? Some like to think of themselves as separated from the whole, they’re not. We’d like to think that what’s happening in the world doesn’t touch us because it’s far away, or because we don’t watch the news, but that’s not the case. What’s true however is that what’s around affects each one of us differently – because we might all be the great ocean together, we are still individually a unique drop in it with our singularities.
So in your self-assessment, you have to understand what’s for you and what’s not and to what degree. Because the idea isn’t for anyone to live in an ivory tower or in a cave far from anything or anyone that doesn’t make them feel blissful. You have to know your capacity, your bandwidth, your level of adaptability. You also have to know the toll things can take on you. It’s not a one size fits all.
From there you can build, test and experiment with strategies to increase your resilience and your window of tolerance because there isn’t an opting out option to life (so to speak). You’re going to need some resources and maybe some tools and people to support you. Though I won’t develop it here, please know that your nervous system has a lot to do with this part, especially if you know yourself as being hypersensitive in more than one area.
Understand that there is what we see and there is what we don’t. And that it’s not because you can’t see something that it’s not there and not impacting you. Think of people’s behaviours, attitudes, conversations, but also their energy, what they exude and project, how an hour with them leaves you. How a place looks, which might be totally different from how it makes you feel. These are cues to pay attention to – do not underestimate that we all are multisensory beings.
If it’s of interest to you, you can look into geobiology which is a field of science that studies the effects of the Earth’s radiation, such as telluric currents and other electromagnetic fields, on biological life, that is you, your plants, your pets. You can get the energy of your living space checked and assessed by a geo-biologist.
Finally I want to evoke another term that you probably haven’t heard of which is “the exposome”. It refers to the totality of environmental exposures an individual experiences throughout their life, encompassing both internal and external factors, and how these exposures combine to impact their health. In a perfect world, this is what every doctor should look at when they diagnose an illness in a patient. But the point to be made isn’t to alarm anyone with a long list of all that is a threat to you in the environment (plenty has already been written about this) but to encourage you to step up to the opportunity to really look at your own surroundings in relation to your own unique self.
This isn’t a one way street. Your environment undeniably impacts you (for good or for ill) and you have agency, to choose, to decide, to change, to pivot and be self-determined in the way you live, where, and with whom.
It starts with you.
Main – Photo by Tim Douglas
