Yesterday I finished listening to the BBC podcast, “The New Gurus” – or rather, almost finished listening because when the host began to cover things I’d rather not think about, I turned it off.
Same with a book I began reading recently. About twenty pages in, I set it down. “Nope,” I thought. “Three hundred pages with these people? No.”
Likewise with a tawdry news story my eye lit upon in the last week. Almost without realizing it, I was drawn in – before suddenly coming back to myself and x’ing out of it. “Is this how I want to spend this time?” I asked myself. “No, thank you.”
Such freedom we possess to stop engaging with what doesn’t please us!
This is a tremendous power so long as we remember to use it.
The world offers us a smorgasbord of options for spending our attention.
We can go online and easily become embroiled in any one of thousands of current issues. We can decide that we are deeply flawed in some way (or many ways!) and devote a lifetime to correcting that flaw, reading books and paying for treatments and chasing solutions that turn to dust just as we grasp them. We can devote decades to a campaign to get other people to think and feel exactly as we do, firing off angry emails or bewailing the lack of consensus. We can easily mistake fury and cynicism for engagement. We can feel bullied into bad feeling by that dreary bumper sticker, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
Sigh.
Here’s the thing: all of this is optional. Once you’re an adult, you get to choose where to focus your attention, where to spend your money, and who to listen to.
So why not think about what we like instead of what we don’t like? What inspires us instead of what brings us down? What makes us feel secure instead of what leaves us on edge? What strengthens us instead of what eats away at our courage and resolve?
We can think about people we love and admire, things we’ve done or are eager to do, places we find beautiful and intriguing.
We can notice the goodness and ingenuity, the loyalty and lightheartedness, the charm and genius of the people who share the world with us.
We can daydream about marvelous adventures. We can stoke our fascination with different cultures. We can get swept up in the wonder of animals. We can decide to think about fun or beauty or warmth or kindness or majesty. Anything you actually like!
Long ago, I decided that I wanted my life to be about music, poetry, stories, and enchantment, and that is indeed what my life is about. How did that happen? Mainly by thinking about these things, by giving them my delighted, devoted, ongoing attention.
In a nutshell –
You build a life you like by thinking about things you like.
You build a life you don’t really like by thinking about things you don’t really like.
AND –
You can take charge of your own brain, you can captain your own ship, you can chart your own path and you can choose what to think about.
So, my friends –
