Take the time to do the things you enjoy.
Be it reading, writing or listening; make time for it.
The rat race has us spending a disproportionate amount of time doing things we don’t like, leaving minimal time for those we do. Maximise it.
Tag: mindfulness
Whilst You Can…Do (5)
Remember to breathe.
It’s the thing that will keep you calm when all around you becomes chaos.
Calm, clarity and serenity can all be achieved by taking care of your breathing.
Whilst You Can…Do (4)
Go outside and enjoy the natural world.
The earth is changing before our very eyes.
What you love about nature, could be gone – forever – soon.
Whilst You Can…Do (3)
Say yes and take that chance of doing or trying something new.
Variety is the spice of life.
Your comfort zone can stand being expanded.
Who knows when something new will be offered to you again?
Whilst You Can…Do (2)
Tell those people you love, that you love them.
You’ll never know how much they need to hear it.
After all, tomorrow is never promised.
Building Up, Not Down
It’s come to my alarming attention, that a lot of the time when seeing other people’s successes, I’m often wanting to see them fail rather than celebrate their success. I blame this largely down to being involved in sports from a very early age. Sport fosters and builds a competitive spirit that can lead to a toxic mindset of needing to see other’s lose, in order to allow us to win. Be it that last second free-throw or watching others struggle in general; the mindset is that you want your opponents to falter for your own gain.
But what happens when that mindset infiltrates normal life?
Well, we still need to be somewhat competitive in life to be ‘successful’. Job interviews require you ‘winning’ against others and that will require, in some part, your competition failing in comparison to yourself. It involves you highlighting your strengths, which becomes a highlighting of these weaknesses in others.
But there isn’t always a need for this competition, whereby you are directly competing with others.
Be it cars, houses or holidays, society has drilled into us the need to compete. Social media ‘likes’ effectively force competition and that’s a large reason as to why I no longer use Facebook. A quick aside, this decision was reaffirmed recently when dining out. A couple on the table next to me sat without conversation for 10 minutes, instead dedicating their focus solely to their phones. Their dinner was served and they instinctively asked the waitress to take a photo of them with their meal. Big smiles, etc. and the photo was taken. They ate their meal in silence and then left. But I suppose it got them the likes they craved on their relevant social media platforms. Behind that snapshot always lies a different picture.
So why do we seek to build down, rather than up? A lot of it is to do with us looking for validation by comparing ourselves to what others have. We do not seek to enjoy the now, instead looking constantly for what we can have next. We judge our own possessions and achievements by who else has them, or can have them.
Instead of judging our own worth by comparing to others, consider how our own worth makes us feel. There is no greater feeling in life to be contented with life. Seek contention in what we have, rather than what we think we need to make us happier.
When it’s hard to let go…
Every experience in life leaves behind its own memory, mark or scar. To what extent we allow those to define us and to influence our next experiences are largely our own choice. But what happens when this becomes more difficult to control?
Relationships are most commonly things that leave behind indelible marks. Having had long-term relationships in the past, certain experiences from them stick with me more significantly than anything else in life. Yes they’ve shaped my views on relationships and what a healthy one looks like, and yes they’ve resulted in better situations. But, they also leaving their calling cards of things that went wrong and these things are exactly what needs to be let go of in order to avoid the same mistakes being made again. If only it were that easy…
We look into things, scrutinising interactions to find what we want to find, rather than what is actually there. We want to find the things that we have experienced before, because this is what we are comfortable with. We always look for reasoning in everything and if that can be sought from previous failed relationships, then so-be-it. Looking for what has occurred before – that which was unhealthy within a relationship – can prove toxic for new relationships. Looking for those signs of failing relationships, within a currently positive one, can throw the balance of things all off. It can bring out insecurities about the current situation and reveal old wounds to new people; people who trust you and don’t want to be judged based on the mistakes of those from the past.
It’s the letting go that is tough. The moving on and moving forwards. The platitude that we tell ourselves that what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger, certainly sounds plausible. But these battle scars are still there, whether on show or not.
The conclusion we have to make is to allow those scars to help us win the war, not the battle.
What Next? 