Games Worth Playing
To create real enjoyment in our lives, full attention is a prerequisite. Pleasure can be achieved floating on the lazy river. Deep enjoyment requires demanding the best of ourselves. Do you know how high you can really jump? Read More
Get Out on the Edge!
Get Out On the Edge! Misstep and You Die!
OK. Maybe the safety harness will catch you, but only after you have banged rather violently against the cold, hard mountain. Clinging to the face of a mountain by one’s fingertips is not a great place to get distracted or randomly take whatever action comes into your top of mind consciousness, wouldn’t you agree?
Imagine the level of focused attention one must bring to climbing. There is no room for meandering thoughts about yesterday’s quarrel with your spouse or tomorrow’s strategic meeting. None. Every bit of your purposeful attention is required.
Be Here Now!
Maybe the negative consequence of “winging it” in your life is neither as immediate, nor as dramatic as climbing a rockface. The fact that your death is not imminent does not make climbing your personal mountain less important. Any activity can be transformed when you see it with the same characteristics that make climbing fully engaging. And you can do it with your feet on the ground.
Creating Effortless Performance
By designing our lives so they demand the best we have to give, we magnetize our attention to focus on the task at hand. This puts us in an experience of “flow,” where even the challenges feel like an effortless performance. We feel a greater sense of control and paradoxically, time seems to both stand still and fly by simultaneously. This experience of full engagement occurs when we let go of our little egoist representations of who we think we are and embrace the bigger, connected Self we have been meant to be. Expecting greatness of ourselves enables it to flourish.
Courageously Being
There is no safety net when you bring all of yourself to your life. But there is also nothing from which you must be protected. Living an authentic life where we no longer concern ourselves with how we are being perceived by the world frees us to be ourselves. There is no other path to one’s greatness than being the best you. Do you really think the person you make up could possible hold a candle to the one that the Universe already created?
I encourage you to play big games, walk on the edge and live a truly inspired life. Tell me what you are up to in the comments, I would love to hear them!