What Matters to Me Now? A Gentle Life Reflection

The Life I’m Living · Reflection 11

There are questions we answer differently at different points in our lives. If you had asked me twenty years ago what mattered most to me, some of my answers would probably have been exactly the same as they are today. Others, I suspect, would have been completely different.

Not because I was wrong then, and certainly not because I’ve somehow worked it all out now. Simply because life changes, and we change along with it.

The things that require our attention change. Families grow and shift. Relationships change. Work takes up more space for a while and then perhaps less. Responsibilities arrive that we never anticipated. Things we once worked very hard towards can become surprisingly unimportant, while things we barely noticed when we were younger can begin to feel enormously precious.

Sometimes those changes are obvious, but more often I think they happen so gradually that we barely notice them at all. We simply keep moving through our days, carrying old priorities and expectations along with us, without ever stopping to ask whether they still belong.

And so that is the question at the heart of this reflection: What matters to me now?

Not what should matter, what mattered ten years ago or what everyone around you appears to value. Just what genuinely matters to you in the life you are living today.

We Can Carry Old Priorities for a Very Long Time

There are things we decide about ourselves quite early in life. We form ideas about what success looks like, what sort of person we want to be, what a good parent does, how a home should be kept, what a successful career looks like and how busy, useful or productive we ought to be.

Some of those ideas will serve us very well for a very long time. Others may quietly stop fitting, and the trouble is that nobody necessarily tells us when that happens. There is no little alarm that goes off to tell us we can stop worrying about something now, or that the standard we’ve been holding ourselves to belonged to a completely different version of our life.

And so we continue. We keep saying yes to something because we have always said yes. We keep pursuing something because once, a long time ago, we decided it was important. We keep maintaining commitments, habits and expectations without really knowing whether we would choose them again today.

Sometimes we don’t even realise we’re doing it.

It can be useful, then, to pause occasionally and ask ourselves:

If I were choosing today, would I still give this the same importance?
Is this something that genuinely matters to me, or something I have simply become accustomed to carrying?
Are there expectations I’m still trying to meet that no longer really belong to the life I’m living?
Is there something I once wanted very much that I’m allowed not to want anymore?

The answer might still be yes. In fact, sometimes asking these questions reminds us just how deeply something continues to matter. But sometimes the answer will be different from the one we might have given five, ten or twenty years ago.

That is useful to know too.

What Matters Doesn’t Have to Sound Important

When we think about the things that matter most to us, there can be a temptation to come up with suitably important answers. Family, health, security, meaningful work, friendship, purpose. And of course, all of those things may matter enormously.

But I think there are smaller, more ordinary answers too.

Perhaps it matters to you that everyone sits down together for dinner when you can. Perhaps you need time outside, or reading is one of the ways you come back to yourself. Perhaps you love being at home. Perhaps you want enough space in your week that you are not permanently rushing from one thing to the next.

Perhaps being available when your teenager suddenly decides to talk — usually at precisely the moment you had intended to go to bed — matters more to you than having everything else finished.

Perhaps you want to see your parents more often, make things, grow things or learn things. Perhaps you want to cook occasionally because you enjoy it rather than because everybody inexplicably expects to eat again. Perhaps you want to laugh more, spend time with people who make you feel good, or simply have a cup of tea that you actually remember to drink while it is still hot.

None of those things sounds particularly impressive written down, but they don’t have to. Ordinary things are allowed to matter enormously.

In fact, when we eventually look back over our lives, I suspect many of the things that mattered most will turn out to have looked very ordinary while we were living them.

Notice the Things You Already Protect

If you’re not quite sure what matters to you at the moment, you don’t necessarily need to sit down and produce an impressive list of your personal values. There are gentler and, I think, often more revealing ways to find the answer.

Start by noticing what you already protect, what you miss when it disappears and what makes an ordinary day feel particularly good. Think about the things you instinctively try to make room for even when life becomes busy.

You might ask yourself:

What do I miss most when life gets particularly busy?
What do I instinctively make room for, even during difficult weeks?
What parts of my life would I be genuinely sad to lose?
When I imagine the next few years, what do I find myself thinking, I really hope we still do that?
When do I feel most comfortably like myself?
What leaves me thinking, I needed that, even if I hadn’t realised beforehand that I did?

Your answers might include a walk, a conversation with somebody you love, an hour in the garden, your work, Sunday lunch, a hobby that has been part of your life for years, an evening when everyone happens to be home at the same time, a quiet morning or a noisy kitchen.

It might be time alone. It might be time together. Quite possibly, it is both.

There doesn’t have to be any particular pattern to your answers. We are not trying to construct a perfect life or come up with an admirable list of priorities. We are simply beginning to notice what makes your particular life feel valuable from the inside.

And Notice What Matters Less Than It Used To

It can be equally interesting to notice what has become less important. Perhaps other people’s approval carries less weight than it once did, or having everything looking perfect doesn’t seem quite so urgent anymore. Perhaps you no longer want the career you once imagined, or you care less about keeping up with what everyone else appears to be doing.

Or perhaps your answers go completely the other way.

Maybe work matters more now. Perhaps after years of putting your own interests to one side, you feel ready to take something seriously again. Perhaps adventure has become more important, or learning, financial independence, friendship, travel, creativity or your health.

There is no correct direction for any of this, and I think that is important to say because reflection can so easily become another quiet list of things we are apparently supposed to want. More simplicity. Less work. More family time. Less ambition. More rest. Those may be exactly the right answers for one person and completely wrong for another.

Instead, you might simply consider:

What do I care much less about than I did a few years ago?
What have I stopped needing to prove?
Is there something I have outgrown without really noticing?
Has anything become more important to me recently?
Are there priorities emerging now that I didn’t have room for in an earlier season of my life?

The purpose isn’t to arrive at the right answer. It is to notice your answer.

And we’re allowed to acknowledge that something matters less now without deciding that all the time we once gave to it was wasted. It mattered then. This is now. Both things can be true.

Does the Life I’m Living Reflect What Matters to Me?

This is where the question becomes a little more interesting, because knowing what matters and actually having room for it are two different things.

If connection matters to you, is there connection in your ordinary life? If being at home matters, do you ever get to enjoy being there? If creativity matters, is there any little corner of your week where it gets to exist? If friendship matters, are there people you keep meaning to contact but somehow never do? If rest matters, is it something you allow yourself, or something you believe you have to earn first?

And if your work matters deeply to you, does it get the attention you want to give it?

These aren’t accusations, and they aren’t necessarily things we need to fix. Real life cannot be arranged entirely around the things we would freely choose. There are bills to pay, people to care for, school runs, appointments, washing, forms, emails, dinners, jobs and responsibilities that do not disappear simply because we have completed a lovely reflective printable.

There will also be seasons when something that matters enormously gets very little of us because something else needs us more. That is part of life too.

So perhaps the questions here are gentler:

Do the things that matter most to me have some room in my life?
Is there something important to me that has been pushed to the edges for a while?
Am I giving enormous amounts of myself to something that no longer matters quite as much?
Is there something I would like to protect a little more carefully?

The question isn’t whether every hour of our day perfectly reflects our priorities. Very few real lives could pass that test.

It is simply whether the things that matter to us still have somewhere to exist.

What Matters to Me in This Particular Season?

Perhaps the most important word in the title of this reflection is now.

We are not deciding what must matter forever. We are not writing a five-year plan or trying to work out who we ought to become. We are looking at this particular season of life and asking what feels important here.

Perhaps there are three things. Perhaps there are ten. Perhaps one answer arrived in your head almost immediately when you began reading and everything else still feels less clear.

You don’t have to turn any of them into goals. You don’t need an action plan, and you certainly don’t need to make them measurable. You can simply recognise that something matters to you, that you want to take care of it and that you would rather it didn’t disappear beneath everything else.

Sometimes that recognition alone subtly changes the way we move through our days.

Free Printable: What Matters to Me Now

I’ve created a simple printable to accompany this reflection and give you somewhere to gather your thoughts. What Matters to Me Now is part of The Life I’m Living Collection and has been designed to sit alongside the other pages as you gradually build your own reflective journal.

The page gives you space to explore:

what matters deeply to you now
what matters less than it once did
what you want to protect
what deserves a little more of your attention
one thing you want to remember from this reflection

DOWNLOAD THE FREE WHAT MATTERS TO ME NOW PRINTABLE

You don’t need to fill every space or come up with beautifully considered answers. Write quickly if that feels easier. Come back to it later. Leave something blank. Change an answer when you realise it isn’t quite right.

As with every page in The Life I’m Living Collection, the printable is a tool, not an assignment.

And if you would rather simply think about the questions while you’re out walking, driving somewhere or sitting with a cup of tea, that counts too.

You’re Allowed to Change Your Answer

One of the reasons I wanted to create The Life I’m Living Collection was because so many of the questions we ask ourselves are presented as though we are supposed to arrive at a final answer. Who am I? What do I want? What matters to me? We can almost treat them as though we should decide these things once and then spend the rest of our lives faithfully following the plan.

But I don’t think life works like that.

Some things may matter to us for as long as we’re here. Others belong to a particular season. Something that feels absolutely central to your life today may eventually become less important, while something you haven’t even thought about for years may find its way back.

There may be things you once took completely for granted that you now understand were precious. And there may be things you spent years worrying about that one day you realise you haven’t thought about in months.

We don’t have to judge any of that. We can simply notice it.

Knowing what matters doesn’t mean reorganising your entire life around it by Monday morning. Sometimes it simply means seeing it clearly enough that, amongst everything else requiring your attention, you are a little more careful not to let it disappear.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.

Continue The Life I’m Living Collection

Next: Reflection 12 · Who Do I Want to Stay Close To?

A gentle look at the relationships that matter to us, the people around whom we can most comfortably be ourselves and the connections we might like to tend a little more carefully.

EXPLORE REFLECTION 12 →

Or return to The Life I’m Living Collection to explore all the reflections and free printables in the series.

VISIT THE LIFE I’M LIVING COLLECTION →

Chat soon,

Ciara x

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