Featured Article
A Lesson from a Neighborhood Walk
The other day I was taking a walk through my neighborhood when I was given an opportunity to become more aware. I am very blessed to live in a neighborhood that has many walking paths, and as I was walking I was feeling grateful for these lovely sidewalks. I was practicing expanding gratitude, and feeling grateful for the pathways, and all the people that made it possible for these paths to exist in our neighborhood. I thanked the designers who conceived of creating all these beautiful walkways, the construction crews who created them, and so on.
Fast forward to a little further along on my walk. As I was approaching our park, I was annoyed to find it filled with noisy activity. The neighborhood maintenance crew was busy blowing leaves and cutting grass and my peaceful walk was disturbed by all of this buzzy noise and commotion. It literally took me about 5 minutes before I recognized the irony of this. The very people for whom I was just feeling gratitude were now causing me to feel annoyed!
I had to laugh as I recognized the lesson here. We truly have the ability to choose how we perceive the things we encounter in our lives. It can be easy to allow our pre-programming to take over, causing us to react to things without thinking. I prefer quiet and nature sounds and so my programmed reaction to the maintenance noise was to be aggravated. But if I can notice when this happens, I can switch to a different viewpoint that allows me to see this in a more positive light. In this case, I am truly grateful we have these people to keep our neighborhood clean and pretty. If I can look at them with that lens, I no longer feel irritated, but instead I find myself feeling loving energy and gratitude as I observe them doing their jobs.
It’s certainly ok to have preferences, and I am not trying to advocate for just “liking” everything you see. But I do find it can be very beneficial to my overall state of happiness to bring awareness to my reactions to things that happen throughout my days. At the very least, that awareness can help soften any negative emotion I am noticing. And with practice, I can also start to use these moments as an opportunity to feel gratitude.
Featured Activity
Noticing your unconscious reactions
Today as you go through your day, see if you can notice when you are reacting to things with a feeling of irritation or negativity. When this happens, just notice and perhaps explore where that feeling comes from. You could even see if you can find a way to flip the feeling to a more positive one.
Sparkling Quote
If you grow in awareness, you will grow in love. - Osho
