You’re driving to work one morning and you see a motorist standing by his disabled car on the shoulder of the road, kicking his flat tire and screaming at the car and his cell phone. His anger and frustration are obvious to anyone and yet it is all useless.
No matter how much we protest the events of life, we cannot change what just happened. We cannot change what happened ten years ago, ten days ago or ten seconds ago. It is done and one second later you may only choose to react or act, so learn to live “at this moment”. This moment is all you can do anything about. This moment is what will bring you success. What happened yesterday cannot possibly bring you success.
If you are out riding a bicycle one morning and you run into a stone and fall head-first over the handle bars into the dirt, you can do nothing about what just happened. You can stand up, stare at the offending stone and curse at it yet that won’t change the scrapes on your hands and knees or the dust all over you. You can choose to dust yourself off and get back on the bike to continue your ride knowing full well that you cannot turn back the clock to thirty seconds before you hit the rock and somehow miraculously see it this time.
One of the most useless phrases in human vocabulary is “I wish”. A long time ago my mother used to respond to that phrase with “If wishes were fishes, we’d all have a fry.” It was annoying at the time but I get it now. “I wish I had seen that rock” is a most useless statement. “I wish I had known I was going to get a flat on the way to work” is even more useless. My mother was trying, in her own inimitable fashion, to tell me how useless it is to wish. Until recently I had almost as much trouble with Dr. Wayne Dyer’s philosophy of, “if you don’t have it, you must not need it” and “you must not need it because you don’t have it”. “If you needed it, it would be here.” I get that now too.
Whatever you do for a living, an avocation, and whatever happens in that experience, you may only ‘do’ at this moment. Participating in the moment enables you to move only forward and direct no energies whatever toward the past. If you come in to work and someone left a pile of papers on your desk to deal with, do you then waste your time chasing down the person who did it to confront them about why all this paperwork is on your desk? Do you, instead, choose to be in the moment and understand that the pile of paper is going nowhere until you deal with it? The sooner you direct your energies toward the pile of papers, the sooner they will disappear. (Ah! Success at last.)
Your child is hurt on the playground and comes home with a bloody lip. Do you drop everything and go find the cause of the bloody lip? Does finding the cause of the bloody lip fix it? Of course not, and yet, what is the first question out of everyone’s mouth? “What happened?” Never mind what happened. Be in the moment. Tend to the child. Tend to his bloody lip. Tend to his pain and discomfort. That is what will prove to productive. When you think about it, anything that caused the bloody lip cannot fix the bloody lip. For the rest of his life that child will know and remember that he got a bloody lip from falling off the swing or Johnny punching him. You can’t do a darn thing about his bloody lip except fix it.
You will be amazed at how your thinking will begin to change as you take a moment after something, anything has happened and ask yourself; “what can I do about right now, at this moment?” What can I do to see success? I can tell you from experience it’s going to take some effort, a radical change in thought patterns. We are taught from day one to react. Don’t react; ACT! Act at this moment, for this moment. This moment is all you can do anything about.
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Also as a marking of the recent passing of my one hundred eighty-second birthday, (isn’t Botox great?!), I am offering a FREE COPY of my murder mystery novel, The Keystone, through Smashwords for a limited time. Just use coupon code VT83S at checkout. The book is available in all digital formats for all digital readers. You may read a Free excerpt or allow me to read the excerpt for you HERE. Happy Birthday to me, and to you too!
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