HOW CURRENT ARE YOU?
Not on world news! HOW CURRENT ARE YOU WITH YOU? My mother had a plethora of little sayings she left inked in my subconscious, two of which come to mind around this subject matter. “You are so busy that you are going to meet yourself coming back down the road,” and “Stop burning the candle at both ends.” She wanted me to understand that busyness and trying to do everything simultaneously leads to not being currently aware of my state of mind/being. How current are you with your state of mind? Knowing it is one of the avenues to peaceful living.
Caitlin Matthews, a New Age Practitioner, reportedly said, “To be at peace with ourselves, we need to know ourselves.” Knowing yourself requires spending time with yourself.
My manicurist is abreast of the nation’s political landscape. She spends time reading, listening, and researching current events and political figures from a variety of sources. My friends who are current on sports news are normally not the ones who have current financial knowledge or the world stage of politics. Each is current in a specific area of interest. How current are you about you?
“YOU” ought to be your “breaking story” every single day. Do you allow yourself to be fully human? Do you treat yourself with loving kindness? Do you honor and recognize your basic goodness? How do you love, communicate, and share? What brings you joy and calms your frazzled soul? If you were reporting on you – how current would your stories be, or would it be a human-interest story previously recorded to be aired as a filler on a slow news day.
Mindfulness is a requirement for knowing yourself. Mindfulness requires time for reflecting. Reflection requires blowing at least one end of the candle out and sometimes both and sitting in darkness long enough to let the stillness investigate your current state. Stillness might ask, “Why or what drives the need to be perpetually busy? Do I need to prove I am a good person? Do I want to live a fully human expression of life- treating myself with loving kindness and compassion without guilt for doing so? What brings me joy? The questions are many and never ending.
To be current with self requires intentionally being attentive to self. The great distractor to intention and attention is busyness – burning the candle at both ends. Said another way, it is allowing the current events of the day to overshadow the true and ever present need to be at peace and to embrace, “I am more than enough.”
Have I figured out ALL of this for myself? Absolutely not!!! However, I do know what my “breaking news” is - witnessing a beautiful sunrise or sunset…pure joy.
PONDER THIS THOUGHT— Overly busy people can be sure of one thing – exhaustion.
