ost women I know have only one conscious priority: making it through the day. This is a direct
result of having been torn in a thousand different directions in anyone twenty-four hour period for decades. Writer, pilot, wife, and mother Anne Morrow Lindbergh calls it "the centrifugal forces of today" that pull at women. But acknowledging, recognizing, and reordering our priorities so that they can give purpose to our days is a deeply personal task that we all need to do if we are to learn how to live by our own lights.
A priority is anything that is important to you. Providing for your children's education by starting a systematic plan of saving could be a priority. So could increasing your health and vitality through diet and exercise. Achieving financial serenity is another priority for many of us, as is nurturing a family and sustaining a loving, happy marriage.
Priorities are not written in granite. They need to be flexible and change
as we do. I find it helpful to think of priorities as the wooden frame upon which we stretch the canvas of our days so that we may apply color and form to the work of art we are creating without the entire painting collapsing in the middle.
It takes peace of mind and clarity to recognize and reorder meaningful, personal priorities. Maybe that is why so many of us procrastinate. But the more our lives and attention spans are segmented by our children, our careers, our homes, our marriages, and our needs for personal expression, the more we need to identify what is truly important in our lives.
Many of us assume that we can continue to get along just by "winging it" indefinitely. We can't. We need an antidote for the hurried and harried lives that threaten to tear us apart. Follow the advice of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and make carving out a small portion of each day for yourself a personal priority. "Quiet time alone, contemplation, prayer, music, a centering line of thought or reading, of study or work. It can be physical or intellectual or artistic, any creative life proceeding from oneself. It need not be an enormous project or a great work. But it should be something of one's own. Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day. . . . What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive."
Today make getting in touch with the Silence within yourself your first priority. As you do, you will be amazed at how everything else seems to find its own order.
