I appreciate the good intentions of the creator of this meme, but it’s not entirely accurate. You only live Now, so how you feel later in the day won’t depend on what you did in the morning—it will always always always depend on what you’re doing Now. That said, the more positive interactions you have with the world the better, so starting with your morning Nows is still a very good idea.
You live in a continuous stream of Moments. Each is like a frame of film in a motion picture. Each Moment is an individual experience and despite your beliefs to the contrary, you always have the ability to control what your attention is focused on during those moments. Each Moment is an edit point—a place where you can shift your thinking to something with a more harmonious frequency.
Because those individual moments can be difficult to define, it is often more practical to segment your life. Once making healthy choices is natural again, the time span of the segments can be progressively reduced. Think of it this way:
Imagine that your car has the back seat filled with a rack of IV bags with different chemicals in them. Some are for anger, some are for laughing, some are for worry, some are for sadness. etc. etc. etc. And they’re all hooked up to a fancy tap. Then imagine an I.V. tube stuck in your vein, feeding you whichever chemical you’re currently dialled into. Got it? Can you picture that?
You’ve got bags and bags of different chemicals in the back seat, and every Moment you’ll get a shot of whichever drug you ask for with your controller (thoughts). It’s a steady stream of drips that seem like one long experience to you because you only notice the shifts from one chemical to the next. So when you’re angry for an hour, you’ll say “That guy cut me off and it made me so mad I was angry for an hour.”
And I would say, “No, a guy cut you off an hour ago and several times per second, from then until now, you chose to repeatedly request the chemicals for anger by unnecessarily choosing to think about that guy.”
You can’t think one positive thought in the morning and have it last all day simply because it existed in a different frame of the movie. It’s not in this shot. But you are. And you’re in the morning shot too. So you can think that positive morning thought. But for it to mean the most, you should really be applying that principle to as many moments in the day as you can.
It is never too late to recover a day. You use the same energy to either make it awesome or make it painful. The choice is yours.
May peace be your companion.
With love, s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
