“The way you live your days is the way you live your life.” ~Annie Dillard
This quote causes me to look at my life from both a macro and a micro level and assess whether the things I’m doing on a daily basis are moving me closer to or further away from the life I want to live.
When observing from a macro level, I think of the words I would use to describe my life. Would I use words like chaotic, stressful, and uninspiring, or would I use words more like joyful, growing, and energizing? This zoomed-out perspective provides me with a state-of-my-life assessment. Whether I’m happy with the assessment or disappointed by it, I can simply zoom in and look at how I’m living each day.
If I like the state of my life, I can identify daily consistencies that cause this outcome, and make sure those are a regular part of my days. Likewise, I can also identify daily behaviors and/or actions that, if left to compound, could negatively impact my life. Once identified, I can eliminate or change these behaviors.
That’s the most encouraging part to me: we can make changes! Our lives are the sum of the days we live. If we don’t like the assessment of our lives, we can change how we live each day. While these changes are not always easy, they are ours to make.
Let’s make sure that we’re living our days in a manner consistent with the life we desire.
Occasionally, we face challenges that seem so overwhelming that we can’t see a clear path to the end. In light of a clear path, all we really need to do is take the next step in front of us.
Here in the Pacific Northwest the Thanksgiving weekend is shaping up to be sunny and cool, with temperatures in the 50s. The skies are a bright blue, and the lingering fall colors are a wonderful display of bright reds, oranges, and yellows. It’s a beautiful scene!
I’m well aware that the gray rainy days that define this part of the country are not far away. With that thought in mind, I want to make sure that I’m not only taking advantage of these sunny days, but also stopping and actually noticing them. It’s far too easy to get tunnel vision and focus only on our routines and daily tasks and miss the beauty that’s happening around us.
Whether it’s a beautiful day or the people around you, take time to slow down and actually notice them as the main even versus simply background displays or noise. There’s much to be noticed and appreciated by those who slow down enough to see it.
I heard someone talking about mindfulness recently, in a way that I hadn’t heard it discussed before. They mentioned that when you’re mindful, you’re able to be curious about how you’re feeling in a situation before you just automatically respond to it.
For example, if a car cuts you off, is your first inclination to lay on the horn, assume the worst about the other driver, or worse? (Yeah, me too!) If, however, we’re being “mindfully curious” we might instead ask something like:
I’ll speak for myself here, but it often seems like I have an autopilot of negative responses that assume the worst in people. These responses manifest themselves in my thoughts, words, and behavior with hardly any effort on my part. They feel almost automatic.
Being a person, whose knee-jerk reaction is to respond negatively, is not who I want to be. As a result, I’m going to work on being more curious of how I feel when I want to react negatively, so that I can gain some perspective and make a better decision. A decision that better aligns with the person I want to be.
I had a great idea for a topic to write about in this week’s post! The idea just popped into my head as I was getting ready Thursday morning, and I was eager to tease it out later in the day. When I sat down to recall the topic, it wasn’t there. Like a vapor, the idea seemed to leave my head as mysteriously as it showed up.
I love the comment “Your head is a great place for having ideas, but it’s a lousy place for storing them”. What I should have done on Thursday morning, was to take 15 seconds to jot the idea down. I didn’t need to write the whole post, this the highlights. Enough for a good mental trigger, to remind me of the idea when it was time to sit down and write. Fortunately, there will be other opportunities to do likewise!
Does your mind supply you with good thoughts and ideas you want to remember for later? If so, I encourage you to capture them when they occur. How you capture it isn’t important; in a journal, on a scrap of paper, digitally on your phone or computer, it really doesn’t matter. The important point is to capture the idea in the moment, so you have it when you need it.
Last weekend as I was leaving the grocery store, I saw a man in the parking lot who had locked his key in his car, and was trying to retrieve them through his partially opened window. From what I saw, it was obvious that he wasn’t going to be successful.
I then noticed another person, who had also seen what was going on, walk up to the guy’s car and offer to help. This person apparently had smaller arms than the owner of the car, because they were able to rather quickly retrieve the keys from the car. Apparently, the car owner’s dog was also locked in the car, so I’m sure the dog was as happy to be set free as the owner was to have his keys!
Although this may seem to be a small act, I’ll bet the owner of the car didn’t think it was.
Let’s be on the lookout for simple ways we can “have someone’s back” who needs assistance. If we were in a similar situation, wouldn’t we want someone to have ours?
By the time this blog is posted, I’ll be back from a trip to the San Juan islands in Washington state. This is some place we’ve wanted to go for many years, but other destinations have always taken priority. This year however, we decided to make it a priority and pay a visit.
I’m amazed by how many cool places are in our back yard (relatively speaking) that we haven’t seen yet. I’m also amazed how easily these places can be deprioritized simply because they are so close. Like most things, it takes intention to actually get to them.
Is there anything that is relatively close to you (geographically or otherwise) that you’d like to experience that you haven’t yet? Perhaps now is the time to cause it to happen.
I just got through spending time learning new riffs on the electric bass. Learning a new riff is often frustrating for me because when I listen to someone playing the riff I’m trying to learn, it seems so easy. Then I start playing it and I’m no where as smooth crisp as the recording I’m listening to. For some reason I feel that I should be able to pick the riff up in just a couple of minutes, and play it as good as the person on the recording.
HA! That NEVER happens!
What I don’t see or hear in the recordings is all the practice that the person put with the riff in order to play it so well. I’m just seeing the finished product, without any mention of the process to get to that point. It makes perfect sense to me that I would have to go through the same process too, but still, I always feel a sense of frustration that the process isn’t much faster.
This frustration can drive us in 2 directions. First, it can cause us to remember that it will take time to achieve mastery of the challenge we seek, and commit ourselves to putting in that time, or it can cause us to give up and walk away, without giving the process a chance to work.
As for me, I’m deciding to commit to the process. Not just with the electric bass, but with other areas of life that require time before I achieve the results I seek.
Whatever area of improvement you’re striving for, be sure to give the process a chance to work.
This week I finished listening to the audio book “E.R. Nurses”, in which about two dozen ER nurses describe some of their experience. It was eye-opening!
I work as an IT person for a hospital, so I am a little familiar with and emergency department. However, I had no idea of the scenarios these nurses have on a regular basis. The biggest thing that stood out for me was how often they have to jump from one tragic event to another, without much time to process what happened. I am grateful for these nurses and the work they do.
The book reminds me that I often have no idea what struggles and challenges people are facing on a daily basis. In light of that, I’m also reminded that I would do well to show grace to others.
Cause Something to Happen 