We all share the same budget of time at the beginning of every week. On our personal spreadsheet of life we invest that limited time in various amounts on various priorities. But the important question is, how often are we investing our budget of time on the things that help us enjoy life and grow? And how often are we simply on emotional autopilot having repetitive experiences?
For the human ego, these priorities are generally dictated by attempts to resolve a fundamental insecurity that grew naturally from some key event early in our lives. So it’s not really our list; chance makes those things our ego’s desire. The real you needs very little to be rewarded.
Excluding sleep, the ego’s list will include primarily boundary-inducing negative practices like rumination, speculation, boredom, second-guessing, angry wonder, blame, self-recrimination, being zoned-out, gossiping, working, eating, daydreaming, and in some happenstance cases it’ll result in fun, laughter and sexuality with very occasional bouts of peace.
That list above was created by a spiritually blind ego –one that is living out of unconscious habit rather than conscious choice. What is the purpose in weighing our days by the deficits we perceive in life? Why weigh ourselves by what didn’t get done and the list of things we don’t like about ourselves or others?
What is the purpose in weighing our days by the deficits we perceive in life?
As much as we can, we should practice dropping that unhealthy behaviour as soon as we notice it. And dropping something is much easier when we pick something else up, so rather than scan life for what disappoints us we should invest our consciousness in more constructive and inspiring moments –moments that allow our natural love of life to shine through.
Moments of love include us looking at flowers or listening to birds or by stopping to pet the neighbour’s cat for a moment of connection to the universe around us. We also exchange a healthy energy with the universe just by stopping to have a short conversation that makes a child or other adult feel valued. We can feel moments of grace when we are helpful to a stranger –or we can even feel good about our success in refraining from attacking ourselves.
We’ll still take that ego spreadsheet out and we’ll start filling it out out of habit. Many things about our lives signal us to got lost in that direction, so it’s up to us to remember that every soul’s lifetime only includes so many pages. So let’s start a new accounting system right away.
As soon as we sense that we’ve accidentally fallen into filling out a list of columns for our ego we should shift to filling out one based on our successes and good feelings.
Both our ego books and the experience of clarity will always exist. But like the old native story about feeding our light wolf over our dark wolf, we are best to invest our energies in filling up the columns that will ultimately add up to a truly worthwhile lifetime.
What’s good about right now?
peace. s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Many people make beautiful connections with others, but too much proximity for too long can mean that we can slowly see those connections atrophy and harden into little more than terminology. Rather than listening to people, we only hear them. Rather than recognising people, we only see them. And rather than loving people actively, as a verb, we think about how we’re confident we love them without ever actually showing it. It’s not that we wouldn’t love them, it’s that we were too busy thinking to truly notice them.
