Energy is available to us all of the time—there is no shortage of it.

At best, such a statement sounds a bit contradictory doesn’t it? At worst, the statement sounds like an outright lie. We all have experienced a lack of energy. We live in a world where people die because there is not enough water or food, or warmth or cool, or medicine, goodness, wellbeing, etc. So how would such a statement even remotely resemble reality?

Once again, I’m talking about something I’m not necessarily good at, even if I think I get the idea. The “trick” of energy is to recognize the kind of energy available to us. It is the lack of recognition and the lack of follow-up that makes us moody, alienated, and unhealthy.

Let’s avoid the energy available for dying at the moment and focus on other things like being awake or being asleep, eating or not, hydrating or not, etc. In other words, let’s take the easy road to make a point about learning to be in sync.

Sure, if we run a marathon we do not have energy immediately available to run another one (it’s an analogy folks, if you can’t run a marathon in the first place, substitute what you could do). If you’ve stayed up for 24-hours, you’re not likely to have enough “awake” energy, if you’ve worked for 12 hours in a row, you’re not likely to have a lot of “work” energy. And so on.

But, in all those cases, one has the opposite energy available—recovering, relaxing/recreating, or resting/sleeping energy. Humans don’t seem to be very good at tapping the available energy as much as we are “good” at pressing the energy we are already engaged in. In fact it seems to me we are best at bemoaning the energy that isn’t available and ignoring the energy that is. We don’t eat when we’re hungry, drink when we’re thirsty, sleep when we’re tired, get up when we’re done sleeping, go to the bathroom when we should, exercise when we need to, don’t exercise when we shouldn’t, be considerate when we ought to. We say yes when we should say no and no when we should say yes. We speak when we should listen and tune out when we should be tuning in. Okay, that’s enough to make the point—we’re out of sync and when one is out of sync, there just isn’t going to be much harmony around us. And there isn’t much harmony around us, globally speaking.

I’m not saying it’s easy to be in sync. Actually I think we’re so polarized by a fear of scarcity and abandonment that we’re nearly constantly engaged in something we shouldn’t be engaged in. It’s no wonder we feel out of energy, we are—in the arena we’re in.

So, what to do? Start small and slow? Take a day a week and only get up if you’re ready, only eat if you’re actually hungry, only sleep if you’re actually tired. Go the bathroom when you need to, go for a walk because you want to—tune in, not out. Give your body the basic idea of harmony. Yep, you might be freaked out when you start that crazy week again—it can feel like you’ve been on vacation only long enough to realize you were just getting started. But at least you engaged in some sanity. Somewhere in your being, you will remember that’s what you were shooting for when you started to become crazy.

That should make you laugh, which is something we could use a bit more of. And don’t get all nutty at once and try to swallow the get-sane, get-in-sync pig whole. Breaking dependencies can itself be tricky, we don’t want to be madly swinging back and forth on some sanity/insanity pendulum.

There’s a new-old world out there, far from the human running-like-mad-to-get-free propensity. It’s a kinder, gentler world, full of novelty and wonder. Oh yeah, and full of exactly the energy we need when we need it. But then that last part has always been that way.