Every word you utter to another human being has an effect, but you don’t know it. If people begin to understand that change comes about as a result of a million tiny acts that seem totally insignificant, well then, they wouldn’t hesitate to take those tiny acts.
Howard Zinn
Inspiration
This Helps Me Get Perspective
Whenever I feel challenged and find myself in a situation where I’m only focussed inward I quickly become aware that I need to find perspective again. You know, to look at the outside world again and get some perspective. Perspective, to me, is that one ingredient that helps me stay in touch with the grander scheme of things. Of life, really. Perspective – of any kind – helps me become aware of what’s really important to me again. It helps me focus on what I’ve got in front of me without feeling challenged
If I really went for it, I could probably list a whole bunch of solutions of how I go about finding perspective again – and maybe someday I will – but that’s not today. Today I just want to share one of the simplest hacks I use to find perspective again. For me watching a video that reminds me how small we (and whatever problems we think we see) are in comparison to what’s all out there.
This a video that does just that.
What’s your favorite way to get perspective again?
I’m focusing and becoming more aware again
Back in 2004, I enrolled in an NLP course in Belgium led by the wonderful Paul Liekens. Learning to understand how we translate whatever our senses pick up and how language patterns get interpreted by our mind was, and still is, one of the most important things I’ve ever learned. It’s something I use every single day.
However, this post is not about NLP, it’s about something else Paul taught me: meditation. We would have these long weekends of 4 to 5 days where every single day before we started the day, we would commence the day by doing meditation.
Even though it felt very unnatural to me at first – I mean, come on, I’m supposed to just sit here wide awake and close my eyes and channel my attention inwards? Wut?! – I soon began to feel the positive effects of beginning the day with some dedicated “me” time. Presence time. There’s something to be said for taking a few minutes aside each day to bring focus to your thoughts and relaxation to your body. It’s a habit I took home with me and started to enjoy even. In the years after my visits to beautiful Belgium I continued to take the time to ground my thoughts and set the focus for the day (or sometimes week).
In spite of the benefits I experienced, after a few years this started to fade in a period where a lot of things were going on for me, resulting in my barely taking the time to sit down and meditate. For years I couldn’t find the time, which is ridiculous, to find a few minutes to center, to focus, to ground. This changed this weekend.
There are a lot of things going on in my world currently, and even though this forces my tendency to solve everything in my head, even more, I decided I would start to remember that meditation actually makes me more focused. Which in return makes me deal with all the stuff that’s going on more effectively.
And as of this weekend, I started to act on that regained knowledge. I’ve downloaded an app – yes, of course, there’s an app for that – that’s going to help me set 5 to 10 minutes aside per day to meditate. To be, to be focused and to become aware again. As a reminder I’ve allowed the app I’m using, Calm, send me a push notification on my iPhone and since I don’t let any other apps send notifications that works pretty effective.
I’m quite happy to have set this change in habit in motion again (thanks for the reminder Chris!) and am looking forward to solidifying this. So, how are you finding your calm and focused self?
Update: Just discovered this one today: possible age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy. That’s not a bad reason to start either 😉
Changing Education Paradigms
I couldn’t agree more with Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert, about the state of our education paradigms and how they are in desperate need of changing
Why argue with this guy?
Although I have been prevented by outward circumstances from observing a strictly vegetarian diet, I have long been an adherent to the cause in principle.
Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the atoledo lot of mankind.
Albert Einstein
Originally I had the following quote here:
Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet
but as Ozh pointed out that quote appears to be a bit too much paraphrasing Einstein. So, I replaced the original quote by the current one.
Introspection with no means of diversion
Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?
But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.
Michael Sacasas
And therein do we err
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein do we err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston
Perfect Circumstances
If you wonder what would be
the perfect circumstances for you,
look at your life right now.