Hectic Day

Today was a hectic day.  In addition to my walking at the goal pace (11 miles/day this month), there was a soccer match, a soccer party, a college football game, and preparations for a business trip.  There were also meetings in the morning with both relatives and friends to work on connection maintenance.

Although the miles were covered, my mind was running at a faster than normal clip keeping tabs on the days activities, and due to these distractions coming to the forefront of thought there are no pictures to share.  I suspect there were pictures worth taking all along the path, but a what was probably a lapse of mindfulness closed my eyes to them.  Observant presentness are not the words to describe my mental state.

One positive outcome as I wrap up the day was a longer period of sitting quietly than has been the custom of the past.  Like the rest of the day, achieving a settled mind was not happening readily.  Breathing became the focus, and there were some initial attempts at cataloging thoughts and emotions as the entered my consciousness and the attempt was made to let them flow through.

Even with the hectic mind, today was a great day though I'm finding I do not have to pursue diversions with nearly the vigor that was my practice in the past.  In fact, the relentless pursuit of entertainment is becoming more and more unsettling as I travel this journey.

Guideposts On The Path...or...The Lesson Will Be Repeated Until It Is Learned

For those that know me in real life, it will come as no particularly stunning revelation that I can be stubborn, hard headed, or at times tenacious.  These can be good characteristics, but as I've been recently discovering, the things that society labels as bad or good are often neither.  For example, I don't think you would find too many contributors willing to put their byline on an article defending the plain good common sense that's associated with procrastination.  Procrastination just doesn't have a "good" cultural connotation in American society.  I have personally encountered situations where the ability to successfully procrastinate was a pivotal skill to determine the positive outcome of a particular project.

There are plenty of other paradoxes where what might generally be viewed as a negative trait might prove crucial to the success of a particular outcome, so I'm not going to bore you with too many stories to attempt to prove that point.  Think about it for a minute, and I'm sure you can name more than a handful of examples that you've personally witnessed.

A Repeated Lesson, or a Coincidence?

coFrom time to time, I find it difficult to decide what I should be doing in the face of these paradoxes.  For times when that uncertainty strikes, I'm going to propose a decision making construct that I've found useful in determining a new course of action in order to keep physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual momentum.

Some of my friends say that, "A lesson will be repeated until it is learned."  Coupled with the fact that I believe that the universe is conspiring with you to make you successful, I have found that there are guideposts to help you head down a path of DOING the next right thing.

Prayer has been a critical activity for me in this regard, and one of the more useful approaches to prayer from my perspective is to seek wisdom and strength.  The most reliable way to seek wisdom that I"ve found is to state my intentions, and ask for roadblocks...clear unambiguous roadblocks if this particular way in which I've chosen to exercise my will is not in harmony with the outline of higher powers.

I've also been told that meditation should be a critical component of my communion with the universe.  This is a practice that I've not been as disciplined at working on as I have been with prayer.  Everyone else probably already knows this, but I was blissfully unaware of the difference between prayer and meditation.  Prayer is the act transmitting your thoughts and will to a higher power for adjudication.  Meditation is listening for the judgement or endorsement of the universe in return.

I keep getting messages from my surroundings about working on my practice of meditation.  I'm five days into a thirty day commitment that I made to practice meditation at least one 2-5 minute period for thirty days. The picture above is the only picture with reasonable lighting that I was able to capture all day. In the interest of practicing mindfulness, I am skeptical that this occurrence is a coincidence. I find it much more likely that this is a lesson that's been repeated until I exhibit at least the basics of retaining it.