I am not content with sitting idly by and watching this life; the only thing I am truly conscious of, to be wasted. I look at people I work with, people who supervise me, and they choose a certain path for their lives. They choose to be cogs in a machine, never looking outside the windows of that machine.
Fair enough. But, that is a life lived for you. It’s a track that leads only to where they want you to be. It is the same thing, over and over. Madness. Pension. Retirement. Death. Making a living is not something I frown upon, but when making a living becomes your life, you lose your life.
Instead of mindlessly serving the machine every day, filling your quotas, making your deadlines, lift someone up. Show someone the beauty of life. In doing so, you may just rediscover it yourself.
There is no goal. There is no journey, there is only how you’re feeling right now. What are you feeling? What are you thinking? Where are you feeling these things? You are feeling them within yourself. There is no externality in what you feel, there is simply the external provocation and the internal reaction.
If you follow this to its obvious conclusion, then everything you have ever needed to be happy, sad and every permutation in between is within yourself. I don’t mean to say this in a metaphysical, kind of fluff way that is supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, I say this because I firmly believe that what we do in our lives is a reflection of how we process our external provocation.
I know a lot of gurus and such essentially say the same thing. But, (I’m probably wrong on this part) they mean things in a primarily metaphysical way, I’m trying to express this in a practical way. What we express is a direct reflection of our thoughts, and what we think is a direct reflection of our language and our own interpretation of what we take in around us.
If that’s the case, then we can easily change our state, by changing our language and learning to reprocess everything in terms that stress the positive aspects of our lives, not the drudgery we have to go through to get there.
We think in language. It’s part of who we are. We are taught self-love and self-communication at a very young age and we continue for most of our lives with those same lessons learned from birth. If we change our language, and we change our physical movements, our frequency of movement, we change our state.
I know this sounds simplistic but it’s true, at least in my experience. Indulge me for just a second.
Last week was a shit week. I mean it was an emotional clusterf**k, lit by the light of a monetary dumpster fire. I was useless for anything but waiting tables and complaining. I was everything I hated. I was the waiter that went to a table all smiles and happiness, but when I passed the doors to the kitchen, I was essentially “f**k everything”.
Then, I went into the back and meditated. I have been in the habit of meditating lately, as it was a habit I used to have when I was a kid drilled in me from years of martial arts. I took five minutes for myself and told myself, I will concentrate on one table at a time. I will run my food, one table at a time, I will concentrate on my motions, and I will concentrate on the happiness of my guests.
I redirected my focus, from the drudgery of the mundane, to the parts of my job that I enjoyed. The running, the smiles on my guests’ faces, the smell of bacon, the feel of the table beneath my hands when I took an order, the smiles and happiness I get in return.
Holy shit, it JUST happened again. Here I am, being all contemplative and centered, then my daughter decides she didn’t want to finish her breakfast before school. I start to get annoyed, the Louis CK skit comes into my head. (”You have a social security number, you’re on the grid m**r, they know I have you et al…”) Then my wife takes her phone out and plays “Eat It” from Weird All Yankovich.
My state changed immediately from a contemplative and centered , then to annoyed and negative, to laughing and playful.
The song brought out the happiness within me. I didn’t need to find happiness, it was within me, I simply chose something specific to allow myself to feel it. I connect in a deep way to Weird Al, I used to listen to him as a kid and he is responsible for a lot of laughs as a kid.
My wife redirected not only my daughter’s focus, but my own. Your ability to live your life is not by the routine, the routine is simply a vehicle. It’s the day to day meaning and feeling that starts within you that defines your ability to successfully live your life.
So, today… I have some homework for you.
Take everything one table at a time. Take things one step at a time, concentrate on your movements your focus and see what should be changed for you to feel something different than what you should be feeling. If you’re unhappy, try shifting your focus and purposely reacting differently to different provocations.
Bring the within, without and everything changes. Come see me at Primanti Brothers in Grove City, Pennsylvania and I’ll tell you all about it.
Cheers.
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Photo: Getty Images