A GREAT DAY

       A GREAT DAY

I enjoy a great day!  I would imagine that most people enjoy having a great day. The best days I've ever had all have one thing in common. I was totally focused, completely absorbed in what I was doing. I wasn't stressing or worried about tomorrow, I wasn't regretting yesterday, I was in the present day. When we invest ourselves in today, completely, we create the environment and conditions for joy. 

“Look To This Day 

For it is Life, the very Life of Life. In Its brief course lie all the Verities and Realities of your existence; 

The Bliss of Growth;

The Glory of Action;

The Splendor of Beauty;

For Yesterday is but a Dream,

And tomorrow is only a Vision: 

But Today well lived makes every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness, and Every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope. Look well, therefore, to This Day!”

JOURNEY vs DESTINATION

JOURNEY vs DESTINATION

In the process of change we are sometimes so focused on the goal or outcome that we totally miss the joys in the journey. How often have you been so focused on a destination for holiday / vacation that you didn't enjoy or even notice the sights along the way? Victor Frankl gives counsel I think relates to to this as well. He says, "Don't aim at success: the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run - in the long run, I say! success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."

Perhaps he is reminding us that happiness isn't a time or place, it's a state if being, a state of mind. 

WHAT AM I MISSING?

WHAT AM I MISSING?

Right now, as you're reading this, are you consciously aware of your breathing, or were you, before I brought it to your attention? Are you aware of your heartbeat? How about the way your collar feels on your neck, or the way the shoes feel on your feet? Actually, thousands of perceptions reach our brains each moment, but we only pay conscious attention to one or at the most a few of them at once. The positive side of this is that we can consciously focus on those few things that we have decided need our attention. The negative side is that the vast majority of sensory input we perceive, we are deleting from our conscious awareness. The reticular activating system (RAS), part of our nervous system, filters out all input we don't want in conscious awareness. Without the RAS we would be in such overload from sensory input that we could not function. There is, however, input that we may be filtering or deleting that could improve the quality of our lives. We can pull these things from being filtered out by taking time to pay conscious attention to them. For example, if while driving you decide to notice all the blue cars in your city, you will notice cars you've never paid attention to before and will most likely be surprised at how many blue cars there are in your city. If you decide to notice the 'good things' in your life, you will notice or become aware of so much you had been deleting before. People who take time to read from spiritual or motivational books everyday notice things of a spiritual or inspiring nature they had been deleting before. One can't help but wonder, "What am I missing?"