If you’ve ever wandered through a forest or jungle or some kind of vast natural wilderness, you know there’s many steps to take to get to the other side. Many challenges under foot. Many bearings can be lost. In fact there’s always lots of other sides, not just your destination but many other destinations.
If you’ve ever wandered through a forest or jungle or some kind of vast natural wilderness, you know there are many steps to tred, to get to the other side. Many challenges under foot. Many bearings can be lost. In fact there’s always lots of other other other sides, not just your destination but many other destinations.
Each path has many flag stops, many different levels of arriving, white water channels of departing and each dead end asks a question which you know full well will have multiple answers.
In your mind you know exactly what you will find when you walk your chosen path and reach your destination, you know the feelings and emotions, this is why you dreamed it and this was the motivation to devote your each and every thought to and within your dreams.
But this jungle has lots of entertaining distractions to figuratively click and post online. Fish with many teeth, monkeys with funny coloured rear ends, parrots saying rude words and odd looking fruits that you will try yet probably regret eating in the morning.
Possibly if you are feeling adventurous and clever and brave you spot a different route, off the beaten track and it takes your eye because you feel a Golden glow, the enticement is too promising to ignore, the cliché why did no one think of this before? Only to discover its promised excitement was a dead end. A dining table of crocodiles with napkins and cutlery waiting for your tasty morsels. These could in effect be real life addictions or fears or compulsions which can at any moment rise up and give you their sexy wriggle until you are trapped.
This jungle, this everyday maze, could easily form an energy zapping experience, quite the opposite to the excited adventure you envisioned and created in your dreams. Accomplished at allowing all its sounds and sights and smells and tastes to over ride the primary objective of reaching your destination, these are the camouflaged tricksters sent out to try us when we begin to search our souls. Sure you can, and should, enjoy every moment of the journey, in the moment and in the joy of all you experience, but you need to stay in charge of your own personal progress, knowing a tiny nudge can easily take you down the OTHER fork in the road.
The jungle will eat you alive if you let it. Don’t be just another soul wandering around from tree to tree dazed and accepting what ever happens next.
Each thought is a choice you make.
Just because a thought enters your head doesn’t mean you have to dwell on it or believe it or act on it.
You can choose what to do with that thought.
I feel a useful habit in these moments, is to feel that thought, and if it doesn’t feel good then dismiss it and replace it with a new thought, that does feel good. It takes practise to form this habit but its a necessity, I feel. You should and can control what you think at any given time. This should be taught at school in year 1.
I know for a fact, for me, from my experience, when you can’t properly focus your mind, you are open to all kinds of doubts and addictions and procrastinations. It’s not because there is anything wrong with us compared to the next soul, but we just don’t always remember a very important fact. We do have a choice and view and say with what is happening in our minds. We hear things in our noggin, using our own voice and accent and just assume that must be what we think and want. I was always the worlds worse for accepting whatever I thought as being what was best for me. Turns out 99% of it wasn’t.
Now, in this generally most amazing time of technology and easy access information, our attention and concentration is at more risk than ever. Pushed and pulled from all angles, we are forced into thoughts and feelings and questions, needing instant decisions, which are completely irrelevant for our personal purpose. Real news, fake news, unnecessary news. Pressure to have an opinion whether you want one or not.
Of course I have continually searched for excuses relating to this, on my intellectual journey, and “research” is always being updated on the reduction of attention spans with all age groups and backgrounds. The more we try to juggle and multitask, the more stretched our capacity to learn and remember and focus becomes. And even though this age brings about it far more opportunities than ever, it also supplies many more barriers to happiness and success than ever. So research tells us. But whilst we take this into account we also take into account they didn’t research me.
So it’s unsurprising that those who are more focused are the true achievers and whilst this takes practise and effort and sacrifice its rewards are greater in this era. But I would also add in any era too.
This isn’t to say that technology and social media and the evolution of the planet and its people are the devil in disguise. All those things are the beauty of the age we are lucky enough to be born into – should we use it to our own personal advantage.
The ancient or past teachings we have come to understand, to settle humanity where it is today, have come from teachers all around the world, from various times and cultures, for centuries before us, and yet it is only in recent years we have enjoyed the instant and unfiltered access thanks to technology.
So now we are the pioneers. Yes, how mad is that! It’s how we use what we have at hand at this time. We are not Greek philosophers, as we sit in our rooms eating cheesy snacks on a mobile device, but we have a responsibility beyond ourselves. I’ll keep telling myself this
POP UP BLOCKER
We live in an age of distraction flashing in front of our faces 24/7 and often when we least expect. Lets face it, when even the fridge and microwave can over-hear your conversations and chat back to you, then you know there’s no safe space in the house to avoid distraction.
Phones and watches and apps and doorbells and boilers and robot vacuum cleaners all chiming and clanging and messaging a never ending universe of demands and reminders and information and curiosities, all begging for our immediate attention and stimulation.
How could one possibly expect to be able to move freely towards the dream-state with so many demands dragging one down like chains around the ankles, slowing to a snails pace, if not completely sinking.
One of the main problems with this deluge of information available to us, is we rarely gain anything from it. Our attention span on average is said to be less than 10 seconds when viewing a web page. Barely enough time to focus on many words at all, let alone their meaning and context in our life. It takes ten seconds to greet a person and exchange names and not much left for discovering how they can change your life for the better. Or not. You know.
Especially when you consider in order to really learn properly, to a level where we can really change our lives and those around us, we need to focus and concentrate deeply and for long periods of time.
So we need an internal pop up blocker to sift through the ever expanding jungle of new technology and information which can often be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, appearing to be useful, but simply leading us along a path to nowhere, except other pop up cul-de-sacs.
On the plus side its fantastic the world is a smaller place, in terms of connections and growth opportunities, richer than ever for sharing and learning, but unless we filter wisely then our already tricky concentration levels will grind slower and heavier.
When we don’t concentrate fully, all we are doing is just reacting to the days event instead of planning and acting on our intentions.
But this is easier said than done…..