What’s underneath your too-busy schedule and mindful ways to simplify.

Book club topics circle around in our home long before we organize our thoughts enough to present them as part of a reading plan. They are in our conversations over coffee, and in the internal questioning we do while we fold laundry or chauffer our kids to their sports practices. They live there in our brains for a bit until something else takes over.

But a recent question I was asked keeps lingering:

“What would you still do if no one ever saw it?”

Interesting.

What if no one sat on the sidelines to cheer? No one saw it in our annual photobook? What if no one read it in the holiday letter? And what if every responsible, diligent, smart thing we did simply went unnoticed by anyone? Would we still do it?

Well. I want my answer to be yes. 

Yes, I’d still bake the homemade bread even if no one ever commented on how good it smelled in my house. Yes, of course I’d still hike even if no one ever saw the photos of us feeling accomplished from the top of the mountain. And, yes, I’d certainly still walk the kids to school on days where the temperature has dropped below 55 and it’s drizzling and my feet are going to get wet, even if I didn’t receive passing comments about our tenacity.

Or would I?

What an interesting question: what would we still do if no one ever saw it? Answering it truthfully exposes where we find our worth and what motivates us.

I can truthfully say that attention is not the only reason I bake bread or hike or walk to school. BUT. It sure doesn’t hurt my motivation.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe you feel like the motivation behind the choices you make is mostly genuine. But somewhere, deep down, there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to admit, we hope someone will notice.

We join committees, accept invitations, and post photos for social approval. We push through exhaustion to be seen as competent. And we say yes to things we don’t want to say yes to hoping we’ll appear generous or successful.

It’s uncomfortable to admit that our actions could be driven by vanity or fear. Or that our perception of worth to others subtly shapes our choices in ways we barely recognize.

Since that question was first posed, I keep asking it over and over: what would we still do if no one ever saw it? And, maybe more importantly, what would we stop doing if no one ever saw it?

You can follow along with the Reading & Reflection guide. Today’s activity will help you check your honest motivation behind your family’s activities.