ATTENTION

“The key to getting things done is doing what’s important, not doing it all.” Adriana Mot

Ten minutes in the bathroom.
Fifteen to get the coffee going.
An hour to get ready altogether, with emails, showers, breakfast of champions, high heels, and makeup, then all covered by colour-coordinated mask.Lipstick to touch up all the mess the masked created.
Powdered and perfumed, out the door into the world.
What will you do today?
Can you maintain focus, harness your mind to continue for hours with its disciplined progression of thoughts and processes? Will your salary cover the neurons you give, your neurons that sharpen the sword which carves your work tasks?

Will you get what you need when you give the world what the world wants?

Pay attention to making an exchange when exchange is warranted. To not offer, unless it is what you really want to do. To give, only what you’re prepared to give. To confidently take what you need for yourself.

That is what attention can mean, if you let it.

HABITS

“How much of human life is lost in waiting.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

The thing about habits is that you can always build new ones. That’s the beauty of it. Yet they are so hard to break. The attachments that we develop toward our own habits are some of the strongest we experience.

In our lives, habits often fill a time of waiting. Time you don’t really know what to do with.  They feast on such incertitude. And other times, they help you grab the day by the horns.

What I like most about those kinds of habits that wheel you into a new day, is that they give you the proper energy and astuteness to tackle the world and to put your mind and body exactly where you want to. Now that, that – is a good habit.

CHANGE

“Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one’s mother’s womb.” Italo Calvino

What is critical about change is that it truly is a gift of survival, as it is the capacity of an individual to alter what does not work in their lives. Every species on earth has that, we’re totally not the ones that clog it as our own.

The most successful changes that we can ever make are those that are true to our own soul and that belong to our own story. If life is a personal narrative, we must understand what makes us take the paths we take, what choices we have at every point on the road because, we do have choices all along, even when it seems that we do not.

Healthy changes do not have to be drastic, nor do they have to reflect those aspects that you hold most dear.  But to block your capacity to change, or simply the willingness to do so, is a sign that your process of dying has started. The thing is that a lot of that process you cannot control. Luckily, change you can.