When Doing More Feels Like Ease: How Alignment, Self-knowledge, and the Multidimensional Self Create a Life that Lifts You
By Braddon Damien White
There are moments when someone says something simple and it opens a quiet doorway of reflection.
I’m working on a speculative philosophical paper about something I had been thinking about recently. After sharing my thesis and abstract on this topic with my Uncle Tom, he replied, “There is so much thought embedded into this. When do you have time to think about anything else?”
He meant it playfully, but the question lingered.
From the outside, my life looks full: a full-time job, supporting my spouse through a challenging season, maintaining a household, writing a book, creating a website, crafting weekly reflective essays, staying connected with family and friends, and going to the gym seven or eight times a week. It sounds like a lot — and to many, it probably looks like too much.
But the truth is something quieter and unexpected:
I feel energized. I feel at ease.
Not overwhelmed. Not burned out.
Actually…lifted.
So his question stayed with me.
Why does my life look busy but feel spacious?
Why does “doing more” feel like “being more myself”?
And why does that feel impossible to explain from the outside?
That’s where this reflection begins.
The Subtle Reorganization of My Life
At some point over the past few years, my life quietly rearranged itself.
I used to binge TV shows like anyone else. A dozen series started. Seasons half-watched. Hours slipping by. I still enjoy television — especially when my husband gets home and wants to unwind together — but I realized something recently:
I don’t crave it anymore.
Not the way I used to.
Instead, I’d rather think.
Write.
Listen to music.
Explore an idea.
Journal.
Contemplate.
Walk.
Move.
Create.
It wasn’t discipline that caused this shift.
It wasn’t a productivity decision.
It wasn’t “optimizing my time.”
It was a quiet internal change:
I just started wanting different things.
This wasn’t elimination — it was evolution.
When People Think You’re Doing Too Much
There’s a strange tension I’ve noticed:
People look at my life and think, “How do you fit all of that in?”
Meanwhile, I sometimes feel like I could be doing more.
Those two perspectives don’t line up unless something deeper is happening beneath the surface.
Most people assume: Doing more = draining. Adding more = overwhelm.
But that only feels true when the things you’re doing pull you away from yourself.
When the things you’re doing feed you, the entire equation changes.
That’s the heart of this reflection.
The Real Principle: Organize Life Around What Feeds You
Here’s the truth I’ve arrived at:
When you organize your life around what genuinely feeds you — and gently release what doesn’t — you create time, energy, and capacity you didn’t know you had.
This isn’t about doing more for the sake of doing more.
It’s not about hustling or squeezing more into the same 24 hours.
It’s about resonance.
If an activity feeds your soul, it returns energy instead of consuming it.
It lifts instead of drains.
It expands instead of constricts.
When your life fills with those activities — writing, movement, stillness, curiosity, reflection, connection — you naturally end up doing more, but feeling better.
The difference is alignment.
What Feeds Me Won’t Be What Feeds You
This is where a lot of people get stuck.
They see someone who seems energized by a full life and think: Maybe I should do what they do.
But alignment isn’t copy-and-paste.
What feeds me — writing, thinking, gym classes, building Transient Harmony, exploring ideas — may not feed you at all. What feeds another person might feel constricting to me.
You can borrow tools from other people, but you can’t borrow their nature.
That’s why every person’s path looks different.
And why it should look different.
You can’t build a fulfilling life from imitation.
You have to build it from self-knowledge.
The Multidimensional Self: Why Alignment Creates Energy Instead of Exhaustion
A big part of this, which I explore more deeply in Transient Harmony, is recognizing that we are not one-dimensional beings.
We are multidimensional — physical, emotional, mental, relational, creative, and spiritual.
Each dimension has different needs and different ways of expressing hunger and fullness.
When we become aware of all aspects of ourselves, we start to see why certain activities expand us and others constrict us. Feeding one dimension while starving the others creates friction; but feeding the whole self creates spaciousness.
When the body is nourished through movement,
the mind through curiosity,
the emotions through connection,
the spirit through reflection,
and the soul through resonance.
Life stops feeling like pressure and starts feeling like expansion.
Being attuned to your multidimensional nature makes it easier to sense what your soul is asking for in the moment — and easier to follow it honestly and without resistance.
The Prerequisite: You Have to Know What Feeds Your Soul
Here’s the part most people miss:
You can’t organize your life around what feeds you if you don’t yet know what feeds you.
That discovery — that inner attunement — is personal work.
It’s why Transient Harmony emphasizes soul awareness, resonance, and the creation of your own conscious framework. You have to meet your nature honestly. You have to see your patterns. You have to listen to your energy.
Without that awareness, you’re guessing.
Or copying.
Or trying to live a life designed for someone else.
The clarity comes when you learn your own wiring.
The Practices That Reveal What Feeds You
Self-knowledge doesn’t arrive all at once. It reveals itself over time through the practices that help us listen.
For me, journaling is one of the strongest tools — it lets me catch my own thoughts, see my patterns, and trace the shape of what’s calling me.
But that’s just one doorway.
For someone else, the doorway may be:
- meditation
- going for a walk
- breathwork
- time in nature
- physical movement
- creative expression
- quiet reflection
- music
- sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee
- or simply noticing how their energy rises and falls throughout the day
In Transient Harmony, I devote a whole part of the book to these practices. Not because one practice works for everyone, but because each person needs a different way of listening to themselves.
The practice isn’t what matters.
The clarity it reveals is.
Alignment Is Not Static — It’s Cyclical
What fed me five years ago isn’t identical to what feeds me now.
And what feeds me now may shift again in the future.
This is why alignment can’t be a one-time event.
It’s an ongoing conversation between the self you are today
and the soul you’ve always been.
This is Adaptive Alignment in motion.
This is Purposeful Discernment.
This is the living, breathing nature of soul awareness.
You observe.
You adjust.
You evolve.
You listen again.
And your life quietly rearranges itself around what you discover.
Closing Reflection: Returning to the Question
So when Uncle Tom asked, “When do you have time to think about anything else?” the honest answer is simple:
I have time because my life is full of what feeds me.
And when something feeds you, it gives back more than it takes.
This isn’t about doing more. It’s about knowing yourself well enough that your life naturally reshapes itself around what brings you alive.
If you feel stretched thin, maybe the question isn’t “How do I find more time?” but rather, “What in my life no longer feeds me?” and “What is calling to me that I keep saying I don’t have time for?”
Those answers don’t appear all at once.
They unfold, slowly and faithfully,
through the practices that help us hear ourselves
and the courage to trust what we find there.