Did you stop sometimes to check how your brain is scarred sometimes to death with no stop flows of fears and useless prejudice or insecurities. I am sure that both you and me could write a book about these daily insomnia creepy moments that sometime take over my and your thoughts. The exercise seems to be how to deal with these moments of weakness and how to focus the energy within the things that you and I could never do or live without. This is an exercise that can produce amazing results.
Present times and all the new possibilities generated by internet, technologies, apps, social media generates a prodigious wealth of possibilities. From self exposure, self branding, education, accessto education, promotion you can also reveal most of your soul within platforms with hundreds of millions of people such as Facebook. And that can create a sensation of being lost. Independent of the sensation of all the friends you seem to have online or other flashy concept, all of that can backfire on you if you do not work your real personality that can or not have an avatar online.
It is fundamental to bear in kind that real-time exposure both social, personal, professional is not what ultimately brings you peace or self awareness. The digital world with its wealth of content, information that comes at an incessant rate should not be the center of your energy / activity but a platform / tools to support your optimisation of time and personal development.
From all the possibilities and directions in the end you are not a digital being but a real human being with body and feelings and a lot of your instinctive features drives you through roller-coasters of emotions, passions, fears… In the end that makes you special is the way you live and manage your day to day activities and the whole of yourself.
In this landscape if you start cleaning the rubbish and the noise only a few topics manage to attract your attention. And not surprisely a even few things will rise to the top and become the key things, trends which are displayed to improve life. The question I always repeat to myself is what are the things that improve behavior, self balance, self development. Independent of the whole persistence of new trends coming and going in life, the quest is to understand the drivers, the things that I could never do without. Besides the trending digital topics on Social Media, all the new zeitgeists, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon the important is what are the things I could never do without.
Trying to understand what makes me feel “I’m a lucky guy” , “Are you lucky in live, love?”, sometimes is a hard thinking. You need to try to answer all of that through some provocative self development exercises. The first important key question is:
Am I making enough to eradicate unhappiness in my life?
To answer this there are no easy formula or solutions. It goes through hard work and balance it with what makes you happy. Bellow some daily exercise that can effectively help with the right persistence and a huge fight against proscrastination:
Taking care of the physical – being in shape. Food, drinking, health, exercise… Yes this is critical, mst of the times being ill is our body remembering us we need to stop exercise, pause. Remembering to do it regularly.
Doing enough to create an Emotional balance– Make sure that you run away from people that bring your negative sides up. Getting closer to the people that bring the best out of you. Nobody is sacred remember make sure that you choose your own tribe. Not the one that drives you nuts, the one where you feel appreciated.
Education and mental exercise. Make sure that you continously learn and educate yourself. Your mental health is critical for your long term surviving, and exercising your mental muscles in your brain does a big difference in avoiding you getting old and refreshing your life goals and self awareness.
Keep a secret space for your inner silence. You need to have time to hear your inner voice, call it silence or whatever makes you understand what is important for you. It can be the case of praying, going to church, a temple, a forest. Just keep this space and run it daily. We are not simple animals and there is something in us of universal appealing, spiritual so this can effectively improve our lives and erradicate a lot of the negative clouds arround us or bring sense and hope to my and your quests and dramas.
To finish I will go through some quotes from personalities and authors that have gone thinking about this through history. Sometimes you and I are so immersed in the present that we forget that most of the things we are living, the big changes in society somehow are repetition of similar (never equal) events, shifts that occurred somewhere, somehow in the past. So the challenge is to try to regularly do some exercise. To try to get out of the weight of the present and read some of the past, ours and the history and try for a while to get out of our own world and visualise others… An important quote to remind:
You give before you get. Napoleon Hil
Some quotes I have been thinking about while researching about the effective things I could never do without:
Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy. Giacomo Casanova
I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him. Abraham Lincoln
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. Winston Churchill
If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Mary Engelbreit
Being in love with life, love all of its sensual pleasures and great people it is critical for success and self development! Also make sure you do fascinating things. Remember it can be simple just go to a new restaurant, a beautiful location. Something that makes you feel good. It can be a walk in the mountain with some close people you admire. Ultimately making sure you do get enough sleep.
Having said that here are 7 things (concepts, states of mind, people) I could never do and live without:
1. Passion for everything single thing you do: “The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.” Earl Nightingale
2. Love: “The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even”. Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. Friends / beloved ones: “A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you just the way you are.”
4. Happiness and learning: “Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.”
5. Dreams, visualisation: “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” James Dean
6. Creativity and evolving: “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” George Bernard Shaw
7. Forgiverness and letting it go: this one is the most difficult one. Though when you make sure you forgive you get in peace and you let yourself go from the thing(s) that most of the time will drown you. So remember everyone who has hurt you and forgive them. Make sure you visualize gratefulness for them and forgive! (but do not keep any feeling of pity for them and of course don’t forget, don’t let it happen again it in any cycle).
In my case the driving factor is that I am a passionated and energetic person looking for total inspiration. And I want to remember that the world is my evolving wonderful stage. I want to make sure that i keep being healthly, adventurous, creative and I need to remember that I have the capacity of dreaming and healing me both physical and psychologically. Also I need to make sure that I will be surprised, that I will continue experimenting, dreaming and sharing, evolving. Last but not least very important I must make sure that I forgive (not forgeting what hurt me, though!). I don’t keep resentment and I focus on changing, learning, evolving!
To finish some wonderful and rich philosophical quotes that I like to read and re-read again. It is is written about the concept of love though you can use it in a root concept to life, values…
“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
St. Augustine
Related articles
- The Perception of Things – Self Awareness (dinisguarda.com)
- Fall in Love with what you like to do, and do it: Now is yours! (dinisguarda.com)