It’s tempting to treat yourself as an inexhaustible resource.

“It’s only for a while”, you say. “Right now there’s just so much for me to do”.

Though when you look back at the nights with insufficient sleep, the days on which you didn’t stop even for a moment, the weeks without exercise or eating healthily or the gifts of true friendship or time to reflect or a massage or listening or being heard or reading for pleasure or giving gifts or receiving them or looking at the sky… when you look back you discover it’s been so much longer than you could have imagined.

And if you observe more closely, with more honesty, you’ll begin to see the price you pay. How your generosity, imagination, vitality, courage, clarity and love are all diminished by your resolute commitment to finishing everything else before you can at last turn your attention to your own self-care.

How will this turn out, do you think, if you keep on abandoning yourself so completely?