I used to be a self-aware person. I was always mindful of how I was approaching a situation. I knew what was coming, and I was prepared to deal with it. I can honestly say that I have since lost that ability. I am constantly on the go, whether it’s driving, walking, or talking on the phone, I am constantly thinking about what is in front of me.
The problem is that this leads to being constantly distracted. I don’t know what I’m doing. I am in the middle of a conversation with my best friend, and I have a question and my brain is trying to come up with a solution and it’s taking me away from the conversation. I can’t be bothered. This is not how you should be doing things. To be able to think and act as a person, you need to be engaged.
In the same way that it’s important to be alert to the world around you, it’s also important to focus on your thoughts. If you’re thinking of what to do, you’ve missed a large portion of the action. I have a rule of thumb that I try to follow: no more than three thoughts on any one given topic are allowed in a given hour.
While you should probably be thinking about doing something, your thoughts should be focused on what you are doing. Not how you are doing it. The idea here is to have a sense of action that is not dependent on how it looks to others.
I personally try to have three thoughts about a given topic in a given hour. One on the topic, one on my current thoughts on the topic, and one on what I want to say about the topic in a one-hour interval. One of the best ways to do this is to take a break from your thoughts and focus on what you are doing.
I like this. The idea is that we are not so much thinking about what we are doing as we are thinking about what we could be doing. It is a bit like your mind racing as you’re driving but as the road is not rushing to meet you, you just want to get through and be as efficient as possible. We can even take a break like this when we need to.
khatrimazafull makes me think of this concept called “stopping.” One of the problems we see when we are driving a car is that we are focused so much on the road that we forget what we are doing. This is why we stop. For example, I notice an empty parking lot. I don’t know how busy it is, but it is empty and I don’t want to park in a crowded space.
Don’t stop. It is not a big deal, but driving a car is like being in a film set.
We don’t have to stop. We just have to figure out what we want to do.
When we are in a car you have to stop. We can’t just start the car at the end of it. We have to stop. This is why we stop. The first thing you would think is, “That would be a pointless stop.” It is stupid. But we don’t have to stop. We just have to finish the car. We have to decide what we want to do.
