This client, in his 50s, had visited me once before, a few years earlier. He was back in Portugal and, feeling the need to relax, booked a new session.
The scheduling was quite confusing, with several calls, messages, and changes, only for everything to end up exactly as it had been in the first phone call. I sensed something wasn't quite right.
When he arrived, he explained that a lot had happened to him over the past few years, and that this was behind all the confusion around booking. He had gone through a period of depression, lost his father, and at work there were times he worked 17 hours straight. As a result, his health had suffered a great deal.Physically, he had gained a lot of weight, his eating habits weren't the healthiest, he drank fairly regularly, and did no physical exercise at all.
His life moved at a fast pace, and his only real break came when he visited Portugal. Here, his routine slowed down a little, but even on what were supposed to be holidays, he still had to work every day.
I found myself thinking, looking at him. If he had known beforehand the toll it would take, the mental exhaustion, the sense of feeling lost and out of control, all the difficulty he carries today, would he have made the same choices?
Our happiness, our health, and everything still to come are, in large part, the result of the choices we make along the way. It's worth choosing with awareness, and whenever possible, choosing in favor of ourselves.
