Coaching Videos & Tips - May 1 2018 No. 556
THERE'S NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT
If we don't deliberately and consistently set about experiencing the here and now, our lives will continue to drift by... before our very (all to closed) eyes. Our subconscious normally lives in the past and our thinking mind is normally occupied with the future - either looking forward to something desirable or undesirable (the latter is called worry)...
Set the alarm on your 'phone for a couple of random times today and, when it goes off, catch yourself!
Catch yourself at where your mind might be, what you might be thinking about, how you might be feeling. Catch yourself at what you're doing and how it fits with what you should really be doing to get you to where you want to go.
The chances are, given the way our normal minds drift on autopilot, that you won't catch yourself... you'll catch yourself out!
I was chatting to a particular individual a couple of months ago - she'd just completed a Mindfulness Measurement Index - and my very first comment to her was that, it looked to me as if, she was simply drifting - relatively happy but drifting... to which she replied that, because she was drifting, she hadn't noticed.
How insightful is that - because I'm drifting, I don't notice. And, yet, she and I were talking, on this occasion, many years after we had first explored the importance of midnfulness, focus and presence in the here and now, mindful of our goals and objectives - what I call Purposeful Focus.
We're wired to drift - I've often described it was being wired to make it through the day - same difference! The result is that we exist but we are not alive, we do stuff but rarely does it move us towards our bigger goals, if we have bigger goals at all. Drifting is comfortable, there's no major stress or upheaval involved, we don't have to be bold or brave. But, as we drift, so does our life drift by - and we're not living it.
I said we're "wired" for drift - evolution has seen to it that we're wired for lots of things that were great 15,000 years ago, not so great now: we're wired to not focus, wired to be stressed, wired to trip ourselves up if we attempt to do anything "brave or courageous", wired to stick with the herd, regardless of mind-numbingly boring that existence might be.
But you'd be an odd person - beyond normal crazy! - if you didn't want to change something about you or your life... not for the want of having more but simply yearning for more happiness and contentment. If there is something you want to change, it starts with a small change to your morning routine... that small change is called meditation and that small change changes everything.
It's a Saturday morning. I'm standing beside the car, in the carpark in front of the Boulangerie where Lisa is queuing - it's a Saturday morning, it's a long queue - for some nice fresh bread. And I'm watching a grandfather playing with his two little grandchildren... yes, playing in a very busy carpark.
Cars are coming and going, jostling for spaces, arguing over spaces and this gentlemen is actually playing hide and seek between the cars with two children who could be no more than four and five years old... running freely in and out between cars, completely invisible to a rushed or reversing motorist.
The children's mother eventually returns, arms laden with bread and cakes and asks "What the hell is going on here?" (That's not a direct translation!!!) to which the older gentleman answers "We were just having a little fun"!