THE MIND BOGGLES!!

Change Your Life | September 7 2023 No. 825

 

 

 

 

This Week's Reflection

 

Every moment of your life, you have a choice - the choice to be immersively present in the moment, aware of what you are, what you're doing, how you're doing it and, indeed, aware of what is happening in and around you or...

 

You can choose to be numb from the neck up. This second choice is, sadly, our default choice and it is chosen for us automatically.

 

That is why I've homed in on routine this week. Routine can be a killer. It encourages routine behaviour, routine thinking - in other words, repetitive automatic behaviour and ruminative thought. And, remember, that repetitive automatic behaviour leads to repetitive "decision making" (if you could even call it that) or, to put it in normal crazy language, making the same bad choices and mistakes over and over again.

 

But routine presents you with a choice: you can choose to do the routine, well, routinely or you can choose to immerse yourself in the task in hand, perhaps encouraging yourself to do it better than the last time! Let's remember, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's Flow research - explained in narrative form is his book of the same name - homed in on people performing routine tasks, whether that was on the automotive production lines in Detroit (long before robots were ever a proposition) or sheep farmers in Italy's Aosta Valley (just the other side of that big white mountain that I can see out the window to my right!).

 

You see, we can use the "system" to break the system - we can employ routine in the very real battle against our automatic routine mind. We choose and we need to choose wisely.