December 19 2017 No. 540
Daydream Believer
Let you at your most creative and imaginative, you at your very best, come to the surface. This part of you, that simply knows best, is rarely heard and never taken seriously - because we're all buried in the mindless thought of the everyday. Question is: do you want everyday to be a repeat of everyday... or do you want to change your life?
Stop thinking, start wondering. Wonder at the beauty of the moment, the sheer exhileration of being alive - the alternative is, literally, as unthinkable as it in inevitable. See where you are, wonder at what has always been before your very eyes. Begin to wonder about what might be, what you really want, what your heart desires, what happiness and success means for you, what it would look like and feel like. Let your mind off the leash of useless, negative, repetitive, destructive thought.
You need to look after yourself. Often, when I ask my clients about their priorities, they, themselves don't get a look in - by that I mean that they're not mentioned in their top three for, if you have more than three priorities, in reality, you have none.
Loved ones and family normally top the list - as they should... but from second spot onwards - the top spot should always be reserved for you. You are the most important person in your life - a truth that was very hard to take for one particular client with whom I was speaking last week: a mother of three who had been widowed when her eldest child was just nine. Now that he's twenty one and the younger girls are progressing through secondary school, she's buried herself in looking after older relatives... never ever leaving a moment for herself. But, as I pointed out, if you don't look after yourself, you're in no shape to look after those you claim to love.
Let's analyse that statement. When I talk about looking after yourself I am, first and foremost, talking about looking after your own state of mind. If you don't do that you will simply continue to be a normal crazy person - perhaps not prone to pulling the legs of turkeys but normal crazy nevertheless! And, if you're normal, buried in thought, you're never present for those you claim to love. Indeed, my aforementioned client concluded, on reflection, that she was so stressed trying to look after her children on her own that she probably hadn't done the kind of job she would dearly have liked to do... they had muddled through, as normal people do on an everyday basis.
When you look after yourself, when you develop and cultivate a clear state of mind, you turn up to your life in the here and now, your become present and it is only when you become present that the old hackneyed expression of "being there for someone" really makes sense. If you love someone, you need to be present with them and for them. And you can only achieve that state by first looking after yourself.
The Festive Season is upon us... all happiness and good cheer. Ho Ho Ho!... or not - just depends on how well you're organized. For, come 4.00pm or even 5.00pm Christmas Eve, the staff on many major department stores will have to face vitriol and verbal abuse from (it has to be said) men who have turned up to buy their loved one's Christmas present at the very last minute, only to find that the desired item is sold out... how inefficient and incosiderate of the shop or shops in question!
This, howevere, is mild in comparison to the story told me by our local butcher who specializes in locally-produced meats. Every Christmas Eve there comes a ritual... the proverbial mud-wrestling over the last turkey in the shop: potential purchasers creeping around the display of foie gras, Rambo style, only to meet their adversary eye-to-eye - each with one leg of the turkey in their hand... it has been known for the final turkey in the shop to be dismembered....