COMPLEXITY

Since we create complexity in our lives, we can also work to eliminate it.  But wait, you say, what about the things that enter my live that add complexity, that I can’t do anything about, things like my kids, my boss, that pile of laundry in the corner.  AH.  

We tend to get caught up in the literal. There will always be a layer of complexity that we can’t LITERALLY make disappear (no matter how badly we wished we could).  The complexity we do have control over however, is our thought process.  In and of itself that pile of laundry is just a thing.  It doesn’t actually have meaning, until of course, we invest it with some.  

That’s the difference.  How we think about things, how we initiate things, how we interpret things, how complex our relationships are, how complex our environment is (for example, if our house is a mess and how that stresses us out), is all a product of how we’ve thought about these things and what meaning we’ve given them. 

Change the meaning, eliminate the complexity.

LIVE NOW

Yup, living in the present moment is definitely the healthiest, most aware and enlightened thing to do.  But most of us don’t really understand what that means.  It doesn’t mean what advertising and marketing geniuses want us to think it means. 

 “Live now” in our popular culture is an object-referral type of living.  We are supposed to define ourselves by the objects that we acquire and surround ourselves with, by the superficial, popularity based relationships we’re supposed to have, by the vacuous gratification from our 15 minutes of fame.  Nothing good will come of this kind of ‘living now’ because we can lose those objects.  Our so called friends and significant others, drawn to us from this type of energy will disappear.  And while all this disappears, so does our sense of who we think we are.

No.  Living now, in the present moment, is about living from the inside out.  It’s about being present with authentic self-esteem that comes from self-referral.  It’s a simple acknowledgment of what is the most fundamental of being human, of being us.  Compassion and love.  It’s about gratitude for the opportunity to be alive today.  It’s about appreciating the power of things we have no control over, like air, like our breath, like our heart beating. But most especially, living in the now is about embracing our heartaches and pain, holding them tenderly and then letting them go.  They do not belong to us.  They belong to what happened then.  And now we are living in the present.

LIFETIME

Emotional stuntedness is the foundation of regret.  Because regret is created from missed opportunities, big and small.  From not repairing a relationship with a family member or friend to not climbing Kilimanjaro.  Over a lifetime it builds into a critical mass of missed opportunities. This big “R” kind of regret will affect our health, our state of mind and how we will spend the rest of our life.  

HIT REPEAT

Emotionally sticky things become old, worn, unproductive, and disfunctional patterns.  These patterns skew our perceptions and hinder our growth.  And the more pain surrounds an emotion, the stickier it is.   The more skewed our perceptions and the more emotionally stunted we become.

REGRET

I’m not sure we truly understand regret, what it means and the impact it has on our lives. The problem is that we can’t wait until we’re 80 or 90-years of age to wrap our brain around it.  We need to understand the toll regret takes now when there’s still time to do something about it, to make sure our regrets are few.  

MARTIAN

If a martian landed on earth today s/he would think that this planet was occupied by laundry-obsessed, creatures with itchy skin, depression, shingles and erections lasting more than three hours. OY!

PEACE OF MIND

We need to stop letting the vacuous, single minded, money grabbing, no-thought-for-what’s-good-for-us marketing machine define what we deserve.  What we really deserve is peace of mind.