The beginning of the year is an interesting time. The change of a single digit gives numerous opportunities for reflection. It’s easy to reflect back to the previous year, remembering who we were and where we were emotionally, mentally and physically.
Around a year ago, when this blog page was started, I came across a quote in The 5am Club book by Robin Sharma.
“Your days are your life in miniature.” – Robin Sharma
I didn’t understand what it meant. But after a year of reflecting, working on my personal growth and development, I’d say it’s a beautiful sentence. This quote can be taken in two ways. It can be used to make changes to our days, therefore our life. Or to understand our life by looking at our days.
Life often feels like it’s happening to us. We either hustle and grind to achieve ‘life’ or think ‘life’ will arrive by waiting out a few years. But the truth is, life is here with us already, in each moment. The way we live our days, makes our weeks, months, years and eventually our life. We may look at our life right now and feel stuck, lost or confused. However, the way we have lived the past years, months, weeks and days have led to where we are. We may not like it, and that’s okay. But we can make a change by making different choices.
There are a lot of behaviors we engage in throughout the day, that include our actions, thoughts, emotions and words. We often produce these without a thought. We get conditioned by numerous ever-changing indiscernible factors, to respond to situations in a specific way. We don’t realize that our conditionings, habits, and non-conscious choices have set our lives on a certain path. We can change these conditionings and habits by recognizing and understanding them, and learning to direct ourselves towards a different outcome. This takes time, effort and energy.
But, life seems too busy for us to work on redirecting our behaviors. However, I have realized that no matter what changes happen in life, what comes and goes, I always remain with myself. Even my emotions, thoughts and perceptions change, but I remain with myself. So life is about feeling happy, content and comfortable with myself. This can be identified when we sit to meditate or when we close our eyes before going to sleep. Even if there are others around us, in those moments we are truly with ourselves. If we take the time to observe the thoughts and emotions that cause disturbance within us, we will find what we need to work on.
Once we identify that, we can search online or learn from those around of the approaches needed to make a change. It takes time to find the one that works best for us (just like it took us time to learn our fashion style). We take death so seriously, yet life so lightly, isn’t that interesting? To live our lives, we have to live each day meaningfully. Whether that be taking care of our health, relaxing, spending time with people who make us smile and not allowing hatred to fill up. It all comes down to the choices we make.
So, what is something you want in your life that you can bring into today?
Proofreader: Kellyn Jeremy
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