Over the past week change has come at me hard and fast. My normal routines are gone along with the regularity they once brought.
So I’ve found myself turning inward. Not in an excessive, touchy-feely way, but in a way that has encouraged mindfulness and meditative clarity.
Lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to step back from all the doing and striving and goal-oriented behavior and am approaching things with a beginner’s mind.
Not judging or imposing my thoughts upon what I’m experiencing, but simply experiencing things as they come. It’s difficult to do, and when we’re children and everything is so bright and interesting and new, it requires no special effort to find that space. As we grow older, finding that clarity requires concentration and focus.
It’s easy to get pulled into our mind’s ongoing internal editorials, streams of consciousness of thinking and rumination that can quickly come to dominate one’s daily existence. That’s how we begin to lose touch with the reality of our situation.
Our success is often defined by our ability to act, not react. Establishing mental distance through mindfulness allows us to move beyond being a pawn on the chessboard. With focus, reflective clarity and inquiry, we become the grandmaster that sees the board of our lives from above.
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The whole notion of goals is an interesting one.
In the fitness world, they are proclaimed as the be all and end all. Which to extent is true, because it defines what you will do in the gym.
However, some of the best people I know are happy to just be. They aren’t striving to increase their subscriber list, or the number of zeros on their salary. They aren’t wondering how they can better themselves from year to year.
They simply take things as they come, enjoy them for what they are without over hyping them when they are good, and deal with the bad in a similar fashion.
Sometimes I wonder if taking this approach to fitness – training with a general plan of being awesome, whilst still ticking all the boxes – lifting, stretching, etc. would lead to better, or at least the same results for most, with much less stress – I need to do x by y can become quite a burden. I talk from experience.