Tag: balance

WHAT IF?

At our weekly altMBA check-in meeting, one of our braver souls shared her plan to take six weeks off before embarking on her next “thing.” The thing was not defined, and the six weeks would be time to ponder, reflect, and choose. Or not.

What if you did that? Would you plan a vacation? Take a class? Sneak in some work?

OR, could you somehow push a magic slow-motion button that is spelled break or brake (either one) and step out of your skin to live in the gaps without filling each one with breathless busy?

What IF?

What if you don’t take any time between this thing and the next? Our professional CVs used to shout “loser” if there were gaps, as if to say, “So, you couldn’t find work, huh?” Or, “What was wrong?” or “Did you have a breakdown? Were you sick? You what? You stayed home with your kids?”

So you switch out of Drive and put yourself in Neutral. What if you have two days pass and you have nothing to show for those two days? Can you put away the I’m-useless, this-was-a-bad-idea fear and believe that creating space for your Self to find itself will be a good use of your time, however long that takes?

What if you honored this time? Protected this time? What if you came into an inheritance or won the lottery? And so what if you took even longer? What if you knew you were facing a risky surgery? What if your chance for survival were only at 10%?

Reflection:

Someone in the group talked about the need for reflection in everything we do. Another person asked our brave six-week-off person if she would be fed or drained by the process, or by the decisions she faced at the end of the six weeks.

What if we all had time to ponder our lives, visit our Selves, and find our truth as we’re living through each of our my-brakes-are-broken days?

What if we made a special appointment time to reflect, like we put it on the calendar and didn’t schedule on top of it?

What if?

Photo compliments of Pexels.com.

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Basket Envy

Have you seen it at Costco? It’s almost a sport. People peek over the top of others’ overstuffed shopping carts… on the way IN and on the way OUT! On the way IN they’re saying, “What do I need to look for once I get in?” On the way OUT, they say (I’ve actually heard it), “Oh Honey, look what we missed!” It’s a metaphor for life these days. “Hey, fella, what do you have in your basket that I might want? What am I missing?” Both feed Social Media. What if you miss out today?

What if you do? So what?

Indeed SO WHAT? Don’t succumb to basket envy. You can catch it later.

What, Me Worry?

I’m still plowing through the 1944 Dale Carnegie book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. The truth of his words in today’s 2016 world makes me realize we’re not that much different today than we were 72 years ago. Or maybe 172 years ago. Or 1172 years ago. I don’t know.

For today’s entry I am sharing from Dale Carnegie’s book this “Just For Today” program by Sibyl F. Partridge, which she wrote in 1925!  If I could do these every day, I’d be worry free. You?

Enjoy!

 JUST FOR TODAY

  1. Just for today I will be happy. This assumes that what Abraham Lincoln said is true, that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Happiness is from within; it is not a matter of externals.
  2. Just for today I will try to adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires. I will take my family, my business, and my luck as they come and fit myself to them.
  3. Just for today I will take care of my body. I will exercise it, care for it, nourish it, not abuse nor neglect it, so that it will be a perfect machine for my bidding.
  4. Just for today I will try to strengthen my mind. I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration.
  5. Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways; I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do as William James suggests, just for exercise.
  6. Just for today I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress as becomingly as possible, talk low, act courteously, be liberal with praise, criticize not at all, nor fault with anything and not try to regulate nor improve anyone.
  7. Just for today I will try to live through this day only, not to tackle my whole life problem at once. I can do things for twelve hours that would appall me if I had to keep them up for a lifetime.
  8. Just for today I will have a program. I will write down what I expect to do every hour. I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it. It will eliminate two pests, hurry and indecision.
  9. Just for today I will have a quiet half hour all by myself and relax. In this half hour sometimes I will think of God, so as to get a little more perspective into my life.
  10. Just for today I will be unafraid, especially I will not be afraid to be happy, to enjoy what is beautiful, to love, and to believe that those I love, love me.

 

Taking a Break

“Give me a break.” In the vernacular, ‘give me a break’ means “Oh, come on.” On the other hand, taking a break has no second meaning. Does that mean it’s more serious? Taking a break is so important that it is mandated by law to protect employees from being forced to work without eating or taking restroom stops.

Taking a Break from WritingTaking breaks makes us more productive. Coffee/tea breaks make life livable. Meditation breaks fill the screen of your mind with a pleasant je ne sais quoi. However it is positioned, taking a break helps balance body, mind and spirit.

One way of taking a break is to have someone do your work for you. Wow, wouldn’t that be cool? This strategy is usually a win-win. Why? The person doing your work often does it better because they don’t consider it work. They like it! And they’re often paid for it, which is good for the economy.

When we’re super busy, we like to convince ourselves that breaks are unnecessary. Been there, done that. However in my saner moments, I figure that if we weren’t supposed to take breaks, we wouldn’t have been designed to eat or to sleep.

“I think I can, I think I can,” says the little train filled with good intentions as it chugs up the steep hill. Of course we all think we can. We’re good. We’re professionals. We’re adults. Mostly, though, we’re invincible. But we’re not. Scientists know. The bad guys are certain: Starve people and keep them from sleeping, and they’ll crack.

Trend Alert: Taking breaks must be important: Google returned 729,000,000 results on the keyword string “taking a break.” This post will make at least 729,000,001! If those were seconds, the time to open up (without even reading) each of the separate results would require 12,150,000 minutes. Gee.  That’s 202,500 hours or 8,437 days. That comes out to 23 years. Taking a break is a very significant concept, evidently. We all need breaks, and more than one every twenty-three years.

Taking a break is essential. Standing up, taking a walk, stretching, reading a book for five or ten minutes. Meditating. Seeing a movie. Going out for a meal. Vacationing.

Breaks refresh, renew, revive, reinvigorate, restore, recharge, revitalize. We all know this. We just need to make time for it, schedule it on our calendars, find a break partner, and make taking a break a habit.

Or we’ll break.

Life Is A LIttle Kid

You never know what will happen when you wake up in the morning. What will this day bring? If I wake up with a positive soul, will the day always bring goodness?

It’s impossible to know what will happen, but comfortable to know that I can respond to what happens in a positive manner. I’d like to believe that I could be okay with anything if my soul is happy and confident in its place.KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

I’d like it if the place I live every day would feel so balanced that I would not let the events of the unfolding day undo me. It’s so transitory, this life, this happiness, this state of mind. Going to work at 7 o’clock and being fired from your job at three o’clock might be a prime example of “stuff happens.” In fact, my friend did just that, and his life and his marriage and his sense of well being flew out from his neatly ordered life and smashed against the tenuous walls of sanity — and we are never sure where we really weigh in on this scale until crap like this happens — and the day he thought he was going to have changed the course of his life irreparably. It’s a crapshoot at best.

Every day can melt without incident into the next until the two by four of chance, the four by four of fate, or the four by six of catastrophe crushes our internal senses into paying attention again.

Life might say, “Look at me!” like little kids do to their moms on the playground. And perhaps Life is just a little kid, playing quietly at times, but challenging us to keep on our toes while it passes off scrapes and scratches at times, but presents us with broken legs, broken hearts and broken dreams at others. We try to keep up with the lessons our kids teach us, including the kid that is Life — and sometimes we fail.

That means learning the lesson all over again later. Life (the Life kid) is good at this. “You didn’t learn last time, so here it is again,” it seems to say.

We wake up the each morning, wondering what the Life kid will bring. You never know if you’ll be fired, be handed a divorce paper, go to the hospital, or win the happiness lottery. One day is fine and the next day is foul —like the weather in Chicago.

Dealing with whatever Life brings makes us strong, or crushes us, and while they say what you’re given makes you stronger… I don’t know about that one.

YES!

Just say yes. Yes to life. Yes to happiness. Yes to adventure.  Yes to experiments. Yes to yesterday. Yes to being outside. Yes to travel. Yes to solitude. Yes to crowds. Yes to humbleness. Giving. Gratitude.  Yes to meditation. Consciousness. Yes to frugality. Yes to IMG_0761creativity. Forgiveness. Prayer. Enlightenment, learning, knowledge.  Yes to children. Babies. Dogs. Bubbles. Water. Quiet. Far off places. Smells. Rising bread. Sweet apple pies. Yes to permanence. Yes to transience. Yes to classes, to study, to goals. To rootlessness, to roots! Yes to writing. Finding joy. Living joy. Living light. Yes to being free. Yes to comfort in your own skin. Yes to solving knotty problems. The scientific method. Trial and error. Dumb luck. Smart luck. Being open to luck. Having love. Giving love. Staying married. Being okay. Always positive. Being the best you can be. Say yes to curiosity. Yes to failure. Say yes to experience. Just say yes.

Corporate Kindness

In today’s USA Today, we saw a renewed focus on corporate kindness.

In the old days, they used to call it social responsibility.

In business school, they used to tell us that social responsibility was not in the interest of the shareholders. The shareholders demand a profit, they said.

That was then. This is now. A good heart is good business.  Giving some of the profits to those in need actually gives customers a better feeling about the company. Better feeling = more business. I do not think the profits and corporate kindness are mutually exclusive… to a point. At some nebulous level, though, the line needs to be drawn. Without profits, a business will not survive, cannot pay its employees, cannot re-invest into product development. The trick is finding the right mix, the correct balance. That trick applies to most things.

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