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Day 151: Keeping Things in Perspective

Posted on January 1, 2019

Yesterday I wrote out some questions for 2019. These were intended as guides, questions for me to think about as we go into a new year. I’d like to go into the first two questions a bit deeper:

  • How can I keep a clear my mind no matter what is occurring in my life?
  • How can I stay in charge of my mood and my mind state?

These questions are closely related. My desire is to keep a clear mind no matter what, to get present, and to keep my mind state in a positive place as much as possible (!). Where it falters, my intention is to get present and get myself back to an empowered state.

I do not take this intention lightly or expect it to be easy. I have found that merely getting present can be tricky at times. Those automatic programs can just take over! Yet I do so much writing, thinking, sharing with others about these things, listening, reading and meditating on this, that I believe I have some powerful tools that work in my favor. The trend is definitely looking up, and I am seeing progress in my ability to get present.

Case in point, here is some of the thinking I have just detected in my head:

Here we are on New Year’s Day. I have spent the last four or five hours… doing book-keeping in preparation for our taxes! Ahhhh! What a nerd I am! It’s January 1st, I mean, I have some time to get this done, last time I checked. I mean, I really could have been doing something more urgent, blah blah blah…

I didn’t realize until just now that this conversation was there in the background while I was working on our numbers. There is some embarrassment about spending my time doing this. It’s part of my money management fetish that I have written about. I just find working with our numbers generally satisfying, calming, reassuring and… fun. And yet, there it is, some automatic programming hassling me.

To fall on my sword here, I do think that a part of me recognizes that sometimes I can easily turn to book-keeping and money management type things sometimes over other things that might deserve attention. Projects that may not come quite as automatically for me as this, like working on my websites. So maybe, on some level, I was using this whole book-keeping project as some sort of procrastination from other high-priority projects that perhaps I have been avoiding.

So how does this relate to my questions for 2019? Because when I did a little writing to clear my mind, I detected that I was making myself wrong. And that, I’ve discovered, is the surest way to send my mind state sideways. Because as long as I’m judging myself, I really can’t be present.

By catching myself doing this just now, I decided to go easy on myself. I decided to forgive myself. I choose to see this situation as it is, not as worse than it is. After all, there are worse things one could be doing on New Year’s Day. I could be injecting my arm with heroin. I could be robbing a bank. Or, more mundanely, I could be wasting away my hours (sorry, couldn’t help the judgmental tone) watching a football game and getting drunk.

I mean, last time I checked, there is virtue in getting our expenses organized for taxes. This is not a bad thing! One thing I have learned about managing my head is that sometimes I really need to keep things in perspective. By easing up on myself, I allow myself to feel better about the situation, and despite a small amount of embarrassment over talking about this subject here, I’m pleased to see myself being nice to myself.

Lightening up, I’ve found, is key to having a clear mind and staying in a positive mind state.

So maybe I’m starting the year off right, after all!

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