Today What Interesting Things Are We Going to do, Brain?
Today we do the same thing we do every day – make choices for our life experiences.
Welcome to Monday. For many people, Monday is the true start of their week – back to work, back to school, back to rote, and routine.
Lots of people come down from the weekend – and time off away from the 5-day repetitive cycle – and start the new week with trepidation, discord, and not the most positive or helpful approach.
Because of how our society works, this is the picture for most. But what if we have another choice? What if today can be just a day full of potential and possibility?
Today is a new day
For the sake of argument, please let me make it clear that I am majorly generalizing, here. I know there are plenty of people who have non-standard and alternative lives they lead. But overall, societal expectations and norms are a 5-day work week and a two-day weekend.
How is today, a Monday, different from yesterday, Sunday? Literally, the sun set and arose anew and the calendar has changed day/date. Let’s just leave that there. If you have a weekend away from work and school – that’s an obvious difference.
For many, Sunday represents a day of rest, few to no obligations, and a dynamic that’s less fixed than Monday.
In western society, we are positively obsessed with the calendar. Dates of significance change what we do, how we do it, and create things to look forward to and things to dread. Christmas on December 25, New Year’s Day on January 1, the date of your birth, anniversaries, and numerous other secular and spiritual holidays.
Because of this date-oriented focus and constant sense of rush and hurry from one to the next – individual days get lost and shunted to a place of insignificance. Spend any time watching TV right now and you will see all the holiday ads reminding you Christmas is less than 2 months away – buy now, dammit!
But every single day is a new day. Why don’t we treat today as special and as significant as New Year’s Day or any other event?
Why would that matter? Because then we are more awake and aware. Which, in turn, gives us more control over our life experiences.
Mindfulness and control
With a few exceptions, most of our so-called leaders prefer we remain disempowered. Tote that barge, lift that bail, fall in line, march to our drums. Don’t think – just do it.
There are times and places to live by rote and routine. However, spending the majority of our time doing that keeps us asleep at the wheel – or in the passenger seat of life, taking no control of our experiences.
I recently wrote that there are only 4 things we truly control in our lives:
- Our thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions
- Our mindset/headspace/psyche conscious self
- The color/cut/style of our hair (all body hair)
- Muscle mass/body shape (to a limited extent)
While this might seem like a short list – truth be told, it’s a lot. As the only person living inside of our heads, the first two dictate the other two.
Conscious awareness of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions puts us in touch with our mindset/headspace/psyche self – our conscious self. From there, we can see our ego and how we project ourselves to the world – and our subconscious, where our beliefs, values, and habits live.
Conscious awareness happens here and now. Looking back to what already was can be super-mixed and tell you very little. Looking forward is speculative at best.
Thus – today can be whatever you choose for it to be – big or small, positive or negative, good or bad, long or short. When you work to be mindful you empower this.
Mindfulness is empowering – because it puts you behind life’s wheel and lets you take control of today and every day.
Choose your own adventure
How you approach any given day is a choice.
When you have a routine – go to work, go to class, move the children from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, and the like – it’s easy to lose yourself in your routine.
The more we let the routine of any aspect of our life drive us – the less we tend to assume control over it. Before long, we’re letting life live us rather than choosing to live life.
To be fair – there are days where rote and routine are a source of comfort. Everyone needs that from time to time. Sometimes we need the reset that comes with that.
But life is not just meant to be survived. We are meant to thrive. Each and every one of us has potential and possibilities for new adventures – big and small – all the time.
How you approach today is a choice you make. Hence, you can choose your own adventure – or not.
Positivity in its true form is a matter of attitude and approach. If you start today feeling blue, thinking it’ll be a slog, and otherwise negative – odds are good that’s what you will experience.
But if you choose instead to look for potential, possibilities, new things to learn and experience – even if they seem super-insignificant – the positive approach helps you experience more positivity.
We are so much more powerful than we tend to think that we are. When more people wake up to this and make use of it – their today can be unique, within their control, and potentially amazing.
Since you are the only one inside your head, this is a fair question to ask: Today, what ARE we going to do, brain?
Choosing how today will be isn’t hard
It begins with mindfulness of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
Knowing that every day we have a choice for how our today will look, we can choose to approach it from a place of positivity or negativity. When we choose to be mindful of what we do for ourselves and not just go by rote and routine – that ultimately empowers us all.
When you are empowered, your mindfulness increases, you become more aware overall, and that gets reflected and spreads to other people. This creates a feedback loop of awareness and positivity – a feedback loop everyone can take part in.
Then, together, we build more positive feelings and discover further reasons to feel positivity and gratitude. That becomes the impetus to improve our lives for the better, help overcome the overwhelming negativity of any current situation, and generate even more positivity and gratitude.
An attitude of gratitude is an attitude of pure positivity. That positivity can generate even greater positive energies – and that is ultimately empowering for all.
Everyone is worthy and deserving of all the good we desire.
This is the four hundred and fifth entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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