Give up

Theres a huge emphasis on ‘Never Giving Up’. But it is more important to give up on the things that don’t serve the larger goals in life. Time and resources are finite and beckon to be used on meaningful things. Not giving up should be reserved to only the most important endeavors. To find abundant time and resources for them to thrive. We carve out and consume time for it to be never available again. Does it serve our goal to lasting happiness or does it serve the status quo?

Systems - The invisible hand

We go through our daily life not knowing we are governed by the possibilities allowed by our systems. A few things we choose to include in our lives dictate the rest of what is possible.

Cities promote haste

Jobs - competitiveness

Capitalism - short sightedness

Social media- low self-worth

Schools - servility

…and so on. It is not that these systems have total control over us, but its always going to gravitate more towards one possibility and not being affected by it is an energy consuming task. Knowing this, we can be conscious as to what systems we choose to be part of and conserve our energy for things that really are important for us to be in.

Shine a light on the dark crevices

One of the lines that Adriene from her online Yoga class says is to ‘Shine a light on the dark crevices’ and she means this for the physical body where many of the organs or muscles of the body are in dormancy and havn’t found much use to feel alive.

Similarly for the mind. We are used to sticking to our regular patterns in our daily lives and there are many dormant areas of our mind that would do well with some exercise.

how easy it is to spend a day getting stuff done…without doing anything meaningful at all. A hypereffective schedule designed to maximise productivity is, in fact, more likely to distract you from what‘s important than help you discover it. - Rob Walker (The Art of Noticing)

Not only is thinking/observing beyond our patterns important, but its also fun. It wouldn’t be wrong to say our routines cripple our observations and the biggest downside of it all is that we miss beauty around us. Day in day out we keep strengthening the same thought patterns and wish we could have breakthroughs of creativity by force.

In his wonderful daily blog Seth mentions:

Wandering around in a digital swamp is a pretty common way to spend an hour these days. Alas, most of us would never consider doing this in a forest. Walking over to a tree because it looked sort of interesting, standing there for a minute, then wandering away. Tree after tree, for hours. - Seth Godin

Good ideas can be planned, great ideas have to be allowed to happen And wandering into seldomly used parts of our mind is a good way to start.