After traveling and going through foreign experiences a good deal in our life. We get to see the same people and places in a very different way.
For starters, once we’ve had a few experiences, it allows for a more diversified and confident standing in one’s perception of the world around. The development of our own world view creates differences in how we co-exist and exchange with others. Respect becomes more fundamental. As does the importance of taking care of ourselves; which in turn allows us to care for others at a greater extent. Just as the saying goes “It is by learning to love ourselves, that we learn to better love others…”.
Letting go of the importance of others opinions in the process of our construction. Being confronted with others long enough will fuel a need to focus more on ourselves as we come to expose what needs to be worked on. “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” We discover the need for boundaries and limitations as we confront our newfound realities with our old relationships or in the words of Mahatma Gandhi -“A ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”
Depending on how open our mind is and how accepting we are of the unavoidable challenges life brings to us. We might find ourselves either putting our heads in the sand waiting for the tigers to pass us by, or decide to force on through the jungle of our illusions.
Moving to the other-side of the world isn’t necessarily where they find the answer they are looking for.
In fact quite to the contrary. By taking a job in another country, I often find that I get to experience a variation of what I am living at home, on the inside. So it stands to reason that I’d want to do more inner work in order to experience better externalities.
Searching for answers only I can find inside of myself, spending any time outside can become futile and even repetitive.
In the book, “A technique for producing ideas” by James Webb Young, the process of “Digesting ideas” and “Different combinations” explains a good deal about how our mind takes in information and then spits it out in the form of perfect ideas. This process of creation is how many fruitful ideas come to be.
I normally find that, from boredom comes creation. It is when I sit still and stay with what ever is making me bored and combining that with something I want to do. That is when the creation begins.
With such technological advancement and such commercial competitiveness and innovation; nearly everyone has access to a smart device with internet. This access, even homeless guys in Barcelona with their shopping carts sitting on the side of cafés to get free wifi, have more or less the capacity to evolve on the same level as anyone at home in Paris. Information is out there in abundance.
Never have human-beings been exposed to so much information. “Information used to be as rare and precious as gold. (It is estimated that one weekday edition of today’s New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime.” Hence, the need to be highly selective with the curation of what we put in our minds.
Creating a plan or list of short term goals to accomplish is very easy to Execute.
It is by imposing the pressure of building a mountain in one night that we get crushed by that same mountain. This creates inertia or paralysis in our action taking. It is by placing a small stone everyday that a mountain comes to be formed, so to speak.
Though, in order to keep one’s mind vivid, it’s important to cut off from outlets like social media or youtube or netflix and others alike as they can rapidly take over our task at hand and we’ll find ourselves having lost a few hours listening or watching something unrelated to the task we had.
Being able to drift is important, even if you are working intently towards a project, it is very easy to forget the outside world and just focus unproductively on a task for hours at a time.
What’s so important about it?
The fact we drift while working, is simply that the task at hand is less interesting to us than what we think or what is actually on our phone. Our work is sometimes less interesting to us than what we would rather be doing.
Times of hyper productivity, and times of Sloth-like hibernation.
I apply my own dual function of sloth like rest and hyper productivity in to this idea.
When you focus on the task at hand , you have bursts of productive energy which becomes very creative and this ultimately makes for better work.
When I have the idea that I’m not working hard enough, (even if I am.) I go and make a chess move and this gives me the notion that I’m not working hard enough, because on one side of my mind I’ve allowed myself to play.
This “Play-work” Technique has allowed me to end my work days, with the entire notion of fulfilling all my tasks, having high results and being able to leave the office full of energy and creativity to complete what I want to complete.
Simply because I have played my Tetris or Chess for minor periods of time during my day. I get to decompress while I work, and focus intently and then go about my tasks and goals once I leave the office at full capacity of energy and creativity.
I find myself repeatedly agreeing to the fact that if something is important enough to us, we’ll get it done. Be it inside of our head or in physical reality.
Stepping away from people who need immediate results may be a solution which might bear its fruits on the long term…
Maybe I wasn’t in the right place, maybe they weren’t the right people.
When the people surrounding us matter, our phones stay tucked away and we go away feeling revived and awake rather than wondering why we lost our time.
To me it seems like the rise of social media is in order to at first give us importance ( facebook), then to diversify our intrests (pintrest/instagram), then for us to find our voice (twitter) after having searched if we are correct or not before (google). Though above all, learning to turn off our devices and just take a breath of fresh air…
Cherokee.blog 