Today, Facebook reminded me of a post I wrote exactly thirteen years ago, quoting a phrase that really resonated with me back then:
God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.
Bill Watterson
Does this feeling ring a bell? The feeling of not doing everything you should be doing, of not accomplishing everything you should be accomplishing, of moving too slowly and not being able to catch up...
I can think of a number of things I could say on this topic (and I probably will say them, in future articles), but for the moment, and taking into account the time of the year, today I´m going to focus on what I discovered to be the consequence (or maybe the cause?) of me feeling this way:
Guilt.
I felt guilty about everything.
Whatever I was doing, I felt guilty for not doing it well enough, or for being wasteful with my time and not productive enough. If I was working, I felt bad for spending little time with my daughters; if I was playing with my daughters, I felt bad for not doing something "more useful", like cleaning or cooking... And the list went on forever, hope you get the idea.
But luckily a few years later, I´m not sure exactly when, at some point something clicked in my head, and I realized that guilt was not delivering any productive outcomes for me, in fact it was the opposite. That was when I consciously decided to stop feeding my own guilt.

Both Spain and Ireland are countries with a very strong Catholic tradition, and the concept of guilt is deeply rooted in Catholicism (I suspect this is also true of other religions, in varying degrees, but Catholicism is the one I grew up in, so it´s the one I know first hand). Now we are about to begin Lent, and here in Ireland, it´s traditional to choose something to give up during these forty days; for example, many people give up eating sweets. I guess that explains the later tradition of stuffing oneself with chocolate on Easter Sunday, you should see the size of some of the Easter eggs 🙂
I remember that, shortly after moving to Ireland, I used to get surprised when they asked me "what are you giving up for Lent?". As it´s not something usually done in Spain, I didn´t know what to answer... Until one year, when the little lightbulb in my head suddenly lit up, and the answer appeared: Guilt! I´m giving up the feeling of unnecessary guilt.
What about you? What have you decided to give up?