Notice the Urgency Before You Obey It
Something happened to me this morning that showed me just how useful the practice of noticing can become.
Dr. Ellen Langer often suggests a wonderfully simple mindfulness exercise: look at something familiar and deliberately notice three things you’ve never noticed before.
I’ve been practicing that.
And this morning I noticed something less charming than a tree, a building or the neighbor walking her dog.
I noticed I hadn’t gained a new subscriber in 48 hours.
Immediately, the old urgency appeared.
Write something. Publish something. Do something before people forget you’re here.
Then I noticed that.
And I realized something important: if I rushed off and wrote an article simply because I was uncomfortable, the article wouldn’t necessarily serve my readers.
It would serve my urgency.
That’s a very different thing.
So instead of obeying it, I asked myself what I actually wanted to do today.
Paint.
There’s a commission waiting on my easel, and that’s where I’m headed.
Maybe that’s one of the real gifts of practicing mindfulness. We begin noticing not only the world around us, but our own automatic reactions.
And once we notice them, we have a choice.
Urgency does not automatically deserve obedience.
Try this for seven days. Find something you see all the time and notice three things about it you’ve never noticed before.
Then start noticing yourself.
That’s where things get interesting.
Anyway, if you like the idea of moving through your days with more trust and less urgency,
And you don’t want every anxious thought deciding what you do next,
You might want to subscribe to The Daily RE-Wire. That’s exactly the kind of encouragement I’m here to give you.
50 years of an alarm clock creates urgency in everyone. This is something we have to mentally and physically take control of is the urgency that has been created bin us from a young age. Furthermore the phones we keep strapped constantly within reach and the emails and videos in all of our new instagrams and other sites has taken our sense of joy and excitement away from us.
I remember my grandmother would often send us letters, she had a way of often drawing eyes or other funny things instead of just writing words to express herself. I have some left but sadly many are missing over the years. To say I would read These over and over filling my heart with joy and my mind with imagination and my heed with just fanciful things… well, when is the last time anyone has received a hand written letter?
Many times my calming when I get out of the rig is just heading to a deer stand and sitting for hours watching the animals work themselves thru the forest as I sit there unnoticed and watching them forage or hunt or just enjoy a pleasant walk.
We all need to live in the moment instead of frantically rushing thru life. The old song from Alabama says it the best.
“I’m in a hurry to get things done oh I rush and rush until life no fun. All I got to do is just live and die but I’m, in a hurry and don’t know why!
Thanks for another great insight!!!!