What color are your glasses?
I changed course. In the midst of my week researching for my intended newsletter of the relationship between strength training and flexibility, one thing kept coming up over and over until I could not deny it anymore.
This pandemic has been a challenging and tragic time for many but for others it’s been a rewarding time of introspection. Your reality is your normal. Whatever it may be, up, down, good or bad, it’s your normal. We may all share common opinions and ideas but our cocktail of ideas is unique to us. This is something I’m sure many know intellectually but I think only through introspection or meditation can anyone truly experience the depth of its veracity. Our normal, our personal bubble affects our perspective. Perspective is a ubiquitous concept in our everyday that we perhaps take for granted. Part and parcel of humanity is the shared experience. When we look beyond our bubble, to read the news (if you can stand it) or commune with others to share thoughts and ideas, do we experience relativity. And maybe gain a different perspective?
A friend was telling me how his retail brick and mortar isn’t doing so hot. How not so hot? With reduced hours and crowd capacity, sales are down 30%. Another business owner friend of his walks in and says her brick and mortar (same type of retail) is doing 30%. I’m giving you the story after the fact. It took these business peers several minutes to realize their respective 30% were not the same. He’s down 30%. His friend is doing only 30%. I think “isn’t doing so hot,” begs a different question now.
Another friend was telling me a story of how his daughter at 2.5 years old picked up a guitar (her size) and started strumming and singing “You are my sunshine”. My friend was impressed to be sure but to him this was normal. Only later, when he shared his stories about her with others did he learn that his kid is in fact off the charts extraordinary.
With the same friend, I said, “I don’t know” in regards to some grand reason of why we do what we do. His reply was, “When you say ‘I don’t know’ you’re putting a cap on the possibility of knowing. Versus, ‘I will know the answer when it will be revealed to me.’ Or ‘I’ll know when I need to know.’” Well, that stopped me in my tracks. I knew I was stuck but I didn’t know how and there it was. My way of thinking was diminishing my potential.
How we govern ourselves: how we think, the words we use in our thought process matter.
This is not a commentary on comparing notes for one upmanship. This is however a suggestion to check your reality. Please consider the possibility of being able to shift your whole day and your whole life with little changes. Examine your thought process. Examine the attitude with which you approach situations. It’s really easy to be a victim if one thinks the whole world is out to get them. It can be just as easy, with practice perhaps, to have a good day everyday embracing the experience that is unique to only you by tweaking your way of thinking little by little. Then each thought is an opportunity to lead you ultimately to change.
A quote from Marc Maron’s interview with President Barack Obama as printed in The New Yorker, “Liberal-in-Chief.” with commentary by Adam Gopnik
May 23 2016
““Sometimes your job is just to make stuff work,” Obama said. “Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were. At the moment, people may feel like we need a fifty-degree turn; we don’t need a two-degree turn. And you say, ‘Well, if I turn fifty degrees, the whole ship turns’ ” over. Note that the President wasn’t saying that big ships aren’t worth turning, just that it takes time. Their very bigness is what makes them turn slowly, but their bigness is also what makes them worth turning.”
How long must we live before we thoughtfully have the kind of life we wish to live.
Blessings to you, dear reader.