Some time ago, in the course of one of my Personal Development Workshops, I pointed out that, generally speaking, when you ask someone how they are today, the answer you’re most likely to get is “not too bad”! On the second day of the workshop, one of the guys said that, on his way in, he’d been listening to early morning radio. Half a dozen people had called the station for a quiz and, in every case, when they were asked how they were this morning, the answer he got was “not too bad” – every single caller! And although I presumed that that type of fed-up response was typically Irish – but I’ve since found out that that’s not so. The French reply that they’re ‘pas mal’, the British respond in much the same way. And even my American clients tell me that, when they say that they’re great, they’re really trying to convince themselves!
A cursory glance at seventy years of research in psychology will tell you that not too bad is about as good as it gets! Normal people, to quote the celebrated spiritualist Anthony deMello, sleepwalk through their lives never realizing that, in order to enjoy life to the full, all they’ve got to do is wake up! Sadly, the ordinary mind goes through life on auto-pilot – the research confirms that, using our psychological capability of automaticity, we pay almost no attention to anything that’s going on. And, in paying no attention to our daily lives, we totally miss the opportunities of life that are staring us in the face.
So wake up – if you’re not so bad today, then that’s simply not good enough! Why would you spend your life in a comfort zone that’s not uncomfortable enough to do wake up and change your life? Do you have to experience a disaster or crisis to wake up? All the evidence suggests that that is the case. The personal development author, Ekhart Tolle, had to endure something like a nervous breakdown, had to end up destitute on a park bench, before he realized that he needed to wake up!
Don’t wait for that to happen. Don’t let yourself down. Don’t let life whizz right past while you complain about not liking your job, while you worry about your finances, while you get stressed out by the ups and downs of what you think is your life. You feel the way you feel because you’ve made things that way. And only you can change your life – you can transform it. All you have to do is wake up.
But how are you going to wake up? Focus on, pay attention to reality, not the stuff that’s going on in your head and making your existence mundane, routine and unfulfilling. Open your eyes, see the reality in front of you. Come to your senses, smell the roses. You’ve got five senses – isn’t it about time that you used them?
