Category: Habits

Kicking the Tires of December 8, 2022

S R Janssen

Today, I am making two old sayings work for me.

  1. “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
  2. “Grow water lilies out of the muck.”

I know I am not the only one over 70 finding myself walking away from a task then failing to come back to finish it. Or, finding myself standing in a room and wondering why I am there. But I have stopped deprecating myself by calling it a senior moment and laughing it off behind a false face.

Make Lemonade and Grow Lilies

Now, I use those moments to make lemonade and grow lilies. I am reframing them: considering them as my messages from my brain telling me to stop horsing around with the irrelevant start focusing on the moment. Yesterday I was in the middle of paring potatoes when a feckless thought flitted across my mind. Like an idiot, I chased after it. Dropped my paring knife and went to my desk to look for the address of an old friend. And found myself wondering what the hell I was doing there.

What I wanted was potatoes for salad within the next half-an-hour, not an address. What a waste of time and energy. But you know, I fell into that habit in my teens. It would take me an hour to accomplish a ten-minute task.Now I don’t have the luxury of time and energy to waste, so my brain teaches me to focus then condense vapid thought into solid accomplishment.

Such experiences are common among the tribe of elders. I have decided to consider these moments to be gifts provide by “the unknown wisdom of life.” For me, it’s an opportunity to dismiss the “monkey mind” of earlier days and concentrate.

We can leverage those moments that are not relevant to what we are doing now. Enjoy the freedom from the unpleasant memories of the past and practice a new skill: engaging in the moment. The western horizon is in sight. Time to stop thinking “over the hill,” and embark on the upward curve. Let’s see how far I can go, how much I can accomplish with the time remaining.

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KICKING THE TIRES OF MY DAY November 18 2022

S R Janssen

Be It Good, or Be It Bad, It’s Done

Writing under pressure! Exactly thirty minutes to write and post. Making things worse, I lost the document that contained the jottings for today’s post. My mind revolves fruitlessly. Oops! Looks like I found a topic. Creating under pressure. Creating against a timeline. Creating a job that must be accomplished. Time is short and I can’t put this off until I have more time to write a better post.

Because

  • These specific moments will never come again.
  • It feels better to accomplish something I told myself I would accomplish, than possibly do a better job at a later date.
  • The more I write, the better I write, that’s the theory anyway and I will pretend that it’s true.

What I I am living a Collection of Habits

Segue to a new thought. I woke up this morning, and I felt like I was a different person. I didn’t feel as if I were another person, but a different side of myself feeling a different set of feelings than those to which I am accustomed. Makes me wonder how much of “who we think we are” is nothing more or less than a set of habits that run themselves automatically.

The Mental Diet: Day Two

S R Janssen

Results from Day One

Overall, yesterday was a resounding success! The success was the energy and focus that I brought to tasks that once I resisted because they seemed overwhelming. I looked at the task, looked at what I would need to have on hand before I started, and began. Solutions to small problems just came to me and i was having so much fun that I was sorry that I had to stop before the job was done. Furthermore, (I can hardly believe this myself) the cat vomiting up piles of undigested breakfast left me unperturbed. I simply cleaned up the messing, using a new way of doing this that I had never used before and that really worked.

Moving into Day Two

Today is about shedding an entire “tapestry” of a subconscious doctrine that I wove from the threads of thoughts, feelings, ideas, and inaccururate believes about my father. If I choose to operate from Neville Goddards point of view that everthing in my immediate environment reflects myself, then my job is to proceed undoing the threads of that relationship by looking at it with new eyes. It’s not even 9 a.m. and here I am in a new place. “Daddy” have many genuine gifts, and I appreciate them and love him for them, while leaving the elements of angst and storm and drung behing. Had I been less resistant and resentful, I might have benefited more from those gifts and benefited from them much sooner.

The immediate task requires me to transform the habitual fear and resentment that I have concerning the recurring Friday task. Accomplishing this requires a prescription. “Active belief that everything is always working out for me in ways more wonderous than anything I could plan”

image of two car tires rolling . Conveys the idea of moving forward in my life in a new and unknown direction
Rolling Along with both wheels on the ground

KICKING THE TIRES OF MY DAYS MARCH 22

S R Janssen

DAYS OF WAR

The sun is rising, bringing with this new day more accounts of death and destruction in Ukraine. More lives lost, more buildings razed, more rubble piled in the streets, and more fertile farmlands strewn with metal detritus instead of young, green plants.

This morning I read billions have been donated in support of Ukraine’s resistance to invasion. Of course, it is heartening that such support is being provided; still, I ask myself why such huge support is triggered by such destructive activities as war, and such meager support is provided for more positive activities such as solving the issues of climate change, pollution, and famine. One wonders if humanity will ever outgrow romanticized view of war.

Yielding to depression helps nothing; it only adds another grain of sand to the pile of despair. Once I read about a World War II fighter pilot, who said he never allowed himself to fly a mission until he felt happy. The “lightness of being” he experienced in his state of happiness opened his senses to enemies lurking behind the glare of the sun. True, that was lifted from a novel, not a biological account. Nevertheless, it gives me a reason to elevate my mood