I woke up the other morning with a ridiculous sense of glee and somehow managed to blow my own mind. What I saw may not mean much to you, but it bowled me over and opened my eyes to something I hadn’t seen before.
My seven year old burst into our bedroom, full of injustice. The previous day, his older sister had gone to a friend’s house and eaten chocolate pudding for tea. He was not best pleased that another of her friends was coming to visit that afternoon. To his mind, this was just not fair, and an extra dollop of i-pad time was the recompense he felt he needed to take his foul feeling away and fill this hole of imbalance.
I understood where he was coming from… who amongst us hasn’t felt the lack of what isn’t at times?
In the midst of a misty mind and its accompanying fog of feelings, it is easy for our sense of wellness to become obscured, to appear as if something outside of ourselves needs to be changed or achieved in order for the wellness inside to be felt. But this is simply an illusion – a trick of the mind. Wellness is what we are made of, so it cannot go anywhere, though it can become invisible to us from time to time. My son had momentarily stepped into a hazy patch and gotten a little lost.
I found myself talking to him about balance sheets (the imaginary log of who has had what, how much and for how long) and how because today was a new day, the balance sheets automatically went back to zero.
“Do you know what today is?”, I asked. He looked a little puzzled and said “Tuesday?”, which was spot on, but not what I was getting at.
“Today is a day that has never existed before. It has never been and it will never be again”, I said. “Anything is possible because it’s brand new. So instead of looking backwards to yesterday or forwards to this afternoon, why don’t we just see what happens?”
And, suddenly, the absolute truth of what I was saying hit me.
Every day is an opportunity to be here, now. To live fully. To see something new. How could it be any different? This moment has never come around before. Even though so many of our daily doings are familiar, we have never, ever, done them in this moment.
I tell ya, my mind was blown to realise that every day, every moment, we have an opportunity to live a beautiful life, to start afresh. We have a wealth of wellness just waiting for us to realise it is there.
Now that, my friends is a true superpower. And we are all born with it.
As we begin to look at the essence of Thought, we will find our way home, inside our own psyche, where our innate mental health resides. This automatically brings about healthier thinking. We don’t have to do anything, other than allow healthier thoughts to emerge. Well-being is our default setting
Elsie Spittle, Our True Identity (page 78)
(To listen to this story, click here)
Yes a positive approach to life is so vital to keep going. If we brood over bygone things we can’t move on.