On a recent morning, I was going through my work emails, deleting the junk ones like I do every day.
The same companies. The same unsolicited marketing tips I throw in the virtual trash every weekday morning. Newsletters I never subscribed to. Sneaky little reasonable enough-sounding messages that regularly squeeze past the junk filter of my email and my brain.
Clicking the little black “X” on emails had become a daily ritual like coffee.
But that particular morning, I came to a realization. I didn’t have to sit there like that girl in the hot dog-flinging meme and have hot dogs in the form of emails flung at my face. I could unsubscribe.
I took a few minutes to unsubscribe from all the email messengers I don’t want contacting me. The actual unsubscribing process was ridiculously simple. Truly, it hardly qualified as a process.
But yet, until that point, I didn’t even think of unsubscribing as an option.
I was reminded that with emails and in life, we have the option of choosing where we put our time and attention, and who we choose to listen to. (Unless of course, it’s our boss at work! But I happen to have great ones).
And if we don’t have great bosses at work, maybe it’s time to give ourselves permission to look elsewhere for workplaces with non-toxic leadership.
There is just so much in life we don’t need to subscribe to.
People’s negative opinions of us. Societal pressure to be thin or to look a certain way. Feeling the need to wear makeup every day.
And oh my God. Don’t even get me started on how this philosophy could be applied to parenting.
Who among us hasn’t received unwanted parenting advice from a nosy MIL or another parent at our child’s school? Unsubscribe.
Mom might have limited your T.V. time growing up to the just the weekends, and suggest you do the same for your kids. But guess what? The times, they are a-changing.
Let’s unsubscribe from Mom’s advice.
I’m not talking about rejecting all advice from here on out.
If we as parents know best, maybe our parents know something, as well.
But if that advice is not something we feel we need and is not welcome, let’s forget about it. Unsubscribe.
Unsubscribing is a useful tool we can teach our kids, as well. Let’s help them work on caring a little less what the popular kids think.
By choosing which “email” we receive, and to hang out with the kids at school or the colleagues at work who have our best interests at heart, we are actively shaping the lives we want.
It’s like we are Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and we could have simply uttered “There’s No Place Like Home”, click our heels three times, and gone home to Kansas all along. We just didn’t know we had the choice.
Sometimes taking charge of the direction we want our lives to go is as simple as doing something that has been an option all along and takes a couple of minutes. Let’ unsubscribe from all the nonsense, and keep our life inboxes full of only what matters most.
