Not Everything That Demands Your Time Deserves Your Attention: Go Deeper & Find the Gold

What Donkey Kong teaches us about healing, hustle & going deeper
July 21, 2025

Last week I had surgery. It was planned, necessary, and like most things in life that demand healing, it quietly rearranged everything that felt like a priority. My body needed deep rest and somewhere between post-op recovery naps and my doctor-prescribed daily stretches, I found myself on a nostalgic adventure… thanks to a jungle, a gorilla, and a gift from my husband.

I grew up obsessed with Donkey Kong 64. The problem-solving, the imagery, the sensation of being dropped into a world that felt so real. I referenced it several times over the years and how it made me feel.

About a month ago, my husband surprised me with a Nintendo Switch 2 so that when Donkey Kong Bananza released, I would be set up for maximum recovery. A gesture of love, but also an invitation: to play, to rest, to return to a part of myself I had unknowingly put on pause for years.

And what unfolded was nothing short of a metaphor for healing, ambition, and the wild terrain of being a entrepreneur with big dreams that make you question the “how” on a daily basis.

🎮 What This Game Is Teaching Me (That SELF-HELP Books Never Quite Did)

Here’s the thing: within minutes of playing Bananza, the ground literally collapses. The game world sinks beneath the earth, layer by layer, level by level. You don’t climb higher to win. You descend. You go deeper.

Every time you conquer a stage, you’re not rewarded with a mountaintop view—you’re dropped even further below.

At first, I felt resistance: Shouldn’t I be climbing out? Getting closer to the surface? (Starting my life again after this surgery?)

But the game was showing me something else entirely.

Just like healing. Just like growth. Just like real-life transformation…

What if the treasure isn’t at the top, but buried deeper within?

⛏️ Down Isn’t Backwards—It’s Beneath

That realization cracked something open.

We’re conditioned to believe that life “begins” once we reach the top. Once we heal. Once we accomplish. Once we prove our worth through productivity and checkmarks and performance.

But what if life is unfolding right here? In the sublayers. In the descent.

Playing this game reminded me: you can look at your situation one of two ways:

  1. The Underdog Loop: You keep trying, but you’re always buried. Always behind. Never enough. You live in a perpetual state of catching up to your “real” life.
  2. The Inner Adventure: You stop chasing surface-level success and start getting curious about what lives inside the levels below. You use challenges as gateways. You explore your emotions with the same curiosity and drive you’d explore a new world. You realize healing isn’t a pitstop. It’s the path.
Person wearing sneakers walking on a wooden path in a sunlit park.

💡 A Floodlight, Not a Flashlight

When I zoom out, I realize what this whole experience is teaching me:

Transformation doesn’t require hustle. It requires illumination.

It’s taking a floodlight to the parts of our lives we’ve been avoiding:

  • The difficult conversation we keep postponing
  • The “silly” dream we keep sidelining
  • The to-do that’s been sitting at the bottom of our list that would actually shift everything
  • The guilt that tells us we have to earn rest before we deserve it

Instead of waiting for burnout, for surgery, for the breakdown moment to give ourselves permission to slow down… what if we just began now?

With a slower sip of your morning tea.
A fiction book.
A puppy snuggle.
A video game.
Or a walk outside that doesn’t have to be “productive” to be necessary.

Black and white photo of stadium floodlights illuminating the night sky in Boston.

📍Map Making for the high achieving, busy MIND

Here’s a little exercise—Donkey Kong-style.

  1. Grab a piece of paper. Draw two dots: where you are and where you want to go.
  2. Now on a separate paper, brain dump your to-dos, ideas, even your guilt-fueled “shoulds”.
  3. One by one, ask yourself: Does this belong on the map between here and there?
  4. If the answer is yes, great, keep it. If not, bless and release.

Not everything that demands your time deserves your attention.

Some things are distractions dressed as responsibilities.

✨ Redefining Productivity

I’m learning (again and again) that productivity isn’t just emails sent and checkmarks made.

It’s moments of clarity between tasks.
It’s energy returned after connection.
It’s peace that fuels action—not replaces it.

That friend catch-up over coffee?
That nap with your dog in the sun?
That creative project with maybe zero monetizable outcome?

All map-worthy. All necessary.

If you’re nodding your head… if you feel a sense of relief just reading this… then I want to invite you to:

  • Discover a mindfulness practice that feels good and fits your life
  • Rewire your relationship with productivity, so it nourishes you, not depletes you
  • Find rest that rebuilds you instead of guilt that weighs you down
  • And most importantly, learn how to play again. Not as a reward, but as a rhythm

Because your life (the gold) doesn’t begin once you reach the surface. It’s happening right now.

With love, presence, and a permission slip to be fully yourself,
Katherine

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