How I Quit a Mediocre Life of Always Waiting for Tomorrow To Be Better in Order to Live
Live moment to moment instead of living so many years ahead of each day.
I want to live.
I quit a mediocre life of waiting for tomorrow to be better.
Today is what I have, yet I keep passing it on.
Running is what I do best. I am always chasing something shiny. I have always been. I don’t remember the time I had nothing creeping on my mind.
My mind is always restless. It wants to grasp. It wants to run.
One day, I found rest. I stopped running, or to put it better, I ran differently.
The truth is, I have always found some of the shiny objects after years of agony, and wait. Here is the problem:
- The party was short-lived.
- The shiny cheese was not what I thought I wanted.
- I missed countless opportunities to live.
- The shiny cheese moved, and so I had to run again. (sadly)
In the movie Run, two ex-lovers activate a long-planned escape plan. To trigger the plan, one of them was supposed to text the other “run”.
Like the two lovers, the run button seems to be constantly turned on in our lives.
When you always run, you miss out on living.
It was 2007, on a cold morning. A violinist stood in a Washington DC train station to play six classical pieces from Bach. Except, he was not just an ordinary violin.
The violin he was playing was worth £3.5 million and the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world whose earlier night tickets totally sold out in Boston for about £100.
Everyone else was so busy. The run button was active as usual. Almost everyone was chasing their daily routine and destination while forgetting to seize the moment.
In the 45 minutes that Bell played, only six people were awake enough to notice the moment.
The question is, will you be running all your life? Will you pass on today for tomorrow? Will you be among the six people who ran mindfully?
From mindless to mindful running
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling On Happiness captures one of the reasons why I think we are always on the run. He says, we rarely know what makes us happy hence we keep stumbling.
Therefore, we run because either we stumbled on the wrong cheese, or we underestimated our desire for the cheese.
Like the cheese station in the book Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, our desires are insatiable.
Desires arise from within only to be replaced by yet another. That means nothing we get will completely make us stop desiring, and thus stop the run button.
The aim is not to control our desires but to be aware of their nature.
We need to shine the light of awareness on the shiny objects that we run after so that we can have power over them.
When we shift our relationship with our desires, then we can run mindfully, be in the moment, and live better.
So where do you begin?
Start practicing the following:
- Notice when your mind is running, and not grounded in the moment to moment living.
- Learn to appreciate the subtle things e.g. your in-breath, and out-breath because focusing on your breathing, has a way of quieting your mind.
- Identify the object of your desire, and name it.
- Acknowledge that desires are insatiable, and therefore, you don’t need to gamble your today, your joy, your happiness, and your peace for it.
- Be mindful of the impermanent nature of things including your desires, and let go of grasping and aversion.
- Do your best to act on what needs to be done now, and let go of the outcome.
- Take personal responsibility for your thoughts, emotions, joy, peace happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment.