FULL-ON, or FULL-STOP
Thursday, June 10, 2021
There is no pain in being original, yet little joy trudging along in old familiar ruts …
It is easy to feel bogged down, face impossibilities, or grind through the regret of things not done, choices not made, or results not achieved.
Fortunately, all those feelings were part of yesterdays, or times past, so there is little value and no need to be satisfied by re-living them.
Today is original. It has never existed before and never will again.
While everyone knows this is true of every day, few people place a high level of importance on its uniqueness nor its potential for being a more significant experience than all days that have ever gone before it.
If we doubt ourselves, there are tests we can try – little experiments of the mind.
If we think we matter a lot to the world, or if we believe we are smart about something – we can reach out to the world, make calls, send emails, post advertising, and invite ourselves onto grand stages to tell all we know. If we try that, we’ll have success. The more we try, the better we get at doing it, the more response we get – there you go, Q.E.D., success and everybody wins.
If we think we don’t matter a lot to the world, or if we feel we are far-removed from brilliance about some subject – we can play turtle, retreat into ourselves, not pick up the phone if it should ring, not answer the mail, and not accept invitations to express our views.
Neither of these experiments gets us where we are going.
They prove where our confidence level is stuck.
Confidence sits on the sidelines, or stuck in the starting gate, notwithstanding its safe-feeling nature, is not our confidence running free around the track – running against a clock, or running against all the other horses, in the end, there is no such thing as best, or worst, or right, or wrong.
There is only living full-on or full-stop.
Go ahead, make your day.
Make it your own.
Reader feedback:
It is 7 years since Ellie left us and just last week, I cried when I found a couple of videos in a file from when she was visiting my sister and brother-in-law when they lived in North Vancouver and I was on a course on Gabriola Island. The missing eases. The love never goes away. Many hugs on this day Mark, LG, Calgary, AB
Mark, I love that you wrote about this. As usual I agree. Pets bring so much joy to our lives and all we are required to do in return is love them and tend to their needs. LH, Lethbridge, AB.