Good morning everyone. Thanks to the day having a bad start, I have a good little lesson along with today’s meditation. My Mom’s schedule has been off since she was in hospital, so she currently wakes up Dad and I a lot throughout the night. A lack of sleep made waking up unpleasant.
That meant I was less positive than normal when I woke up. Rather than intend a great day, I actually scoffed at my own exercise. See how easy it is? In my thoughts, just a simple bad start had me challenging the day to a battle. Fortunately, I soon accepted how big the universe is, and how small I am, and I surrendered that idea as lame.
Rather than trying to strangle the world into giving me a good day, I chose to trust every day’s generosity and abundance. From there I have focused on finding the gifts in my day. That’s when I realized that my falter would be a useful reminder for today’s post. It demonstrates how we can save ourselves from a course of thought.
The whole process from waking up, to stupidly challenging the world, to wisely surrendering, and then feeling grateful, took about 25 minutes. That’s how long it took to convert an entire day from being potentially bad into one likely to be good.
Having negative thoughts is a given. But our freedom resides in our ability to alter our focus to more rewarding ideas. Today’s meditation speaks to that choice by asking us to find a minimum of 3 instances where our lives could have easily gotten much worse, but the impact of some aspect of life hit someone else instead.
As we do this, it is important that we take the time to imagine the very negative consequences that would have flowed out of being the other person. Life is not just other people being luckier than us. We are also luckier than others. It’s worthwhile noticing that fact.
Maybe we pulled the fire alarm but a classmate got blamed. Maybe we rarely used condoms but our best friend who almost always did use them was the one to get pregnant.
Maybe we screwed up at work but it appeared the fault was with someone else who paid dearly for the mistake. Maybe our drunken, father focused his rage on our brother and not us.
Maybe heart disease runs in the family but we’re the only one who doesn’t have it. Maybe during layoffs we kept our job while a friend who does the same thing we do, did not.
Maybe we got to love someone that other people were attracted to as well. As much frustration as many people feel toward their partners, many would still not want their spouse married to someone else.
All of us have plenty of good fortune in our lives. But through nature of habit we tend to review our lives the same way we face the present. Some people are watching for the victories and others the losses.
The people who search for the victories only read these blog posts to maintain their awareness. But the best way to help the group that was innocently taught to look for losses, is to remind you all through an exercise like this, that not accounting for our good fortune can cause it to appear as though it doesn’t exist.
Our lives are precious and perfect, but we rarely realize this until death is imminent. Don’t wait for life to run out before you want more of it. Want more now.
Rather than asking our days for more good fortune, we are better to focus on learning to find the fortune that is already there. We are all fortunate to be ourselves. Our job in life is merely to enjoy finding out how and why that’s true.
peace. s
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.