Sunday 18th June 2023, Crawley, West Sussex. It’s raining again. Guinea pigs :-{
You and I know how this goes. One minute, pushing thirty, thinking about how long you have left, then B O O M you are celebrating your sixty third birthday – all in the blink of an eye.
Left wondering where it went. Accumulated some stuff, handful of assets, perhaps even a house and some toys. Your pension is looking ok ‘ish and your children are still talking to you but others are not.
It took you a while to work who the arseholes were. And when you did, you understood a bit more about life.
The promises you made to yourself, the big ones, when you finished Uni or School. The ones where you were sure that you wouldn’t ever take no for an answer, that you wouldn’t short change yourself, no comprises. All of these are forgotten now.
Your life, like mine is a compromise, everything is a trade off because otherwise it’d be perfect, every decision we make would be the right one. A perfect moment for a perfect decision based on all of the information and at the right time.
Yeah, you’ve spotted the flaw in that!
Everything in our lives is a compromise, everything involves a trade off; nothing is ever that perfect.
Yet, the right moments are always around us. They are always coming. The Buddhists will tell us that the next breath, this breath will be the perfect one – as long as it’s not our last things will be good.
I always say that if you awake in the morning and you push your elbows out and don’t feel the side of the coffin then today is going to be good day. Certainly at least better than it could be.
Moment to moment. Is how we should be living our lives. Pencilled in plans and a general direction of course is needed. But moment to moment, breath to breath is how we have to live our lives. The now is the important bit, to be awake, to be alive – to be present is where we have to be, have to live a life – your life.
Our minds – that part of our brain that thinks, will do it’s best to distract you to keep you on some kind of autopilot. It does this by design. It is how it keeps you alive – but it also makes sure that you don’t notice, that things slip by you because you are not present – not even in the room with some people.
This is how it works. If you could ask your thinking mind to give you the resources needed to cross the road, the energy, the hormones for messaging muscles, to liaise with hearing and sight to make sure you know what’s coming before your move, to judge distances to be aware, and then to flag up the obstacles, kerb stones or crossing markers…
And then move the muscles and get it all organised and monitored. If you had to that in real time, in thinking time. Then we’d see bodies squished, it just wouldn’t be possible for our thinking mind to do all of that for us.
So our subconscious mind does all of that for us. By design it takes over.
Problem is, it is a bit too powerful in that it takes over control of large chunks of our life and steers us where it wants – where it wants to keep us safe – not where we should be heading by choice.
It also does it without us noticing – and that is your life from thirty to sixty three goes without explanation or notice. Quite simply by design it goes into the ether while we live our life our brain eats time for us. As soon as you become aware of it, as soon as you start to notice, you can slow it down you can take control. It’s called being in the zone or being in flow – being present. Here, right now. In the room.
We can practice it now with a simple technique.
Take a deep breath, and prepare for the next one. As you do imagine everything in your life being there, and not here.
Here is just you and the next breath. Then repeat. Feel yourself becoming present. Let everything go, just focus on your breath.
Practice that for a while, learn how it feels. Enjoy it.
Tomorrow, there will be some more on the subject.
When you are ready to get a shimmy on with some of this – then get in touch