It’s so easy to be swept away and carried along through life. We are distracted and over-scheduled. We are detached from real life by screens and notifications. We are separated from the real world by where we spend our time: climate controlled building to climate controlled vehicle into another climate controlled building.
It takes an effort to pause and notice where we are, what we’re doing or even who we are. Is who we are something that we are actively aware of and steering or is who we are just another thing that’s happening to us? Another product of being swept away and carried along?
That’s fucked up. But if we just let life happen to us then who we are is more about these external forces and distractions than it is about what we really want and how we really want to live. If we aren’t noticing where we are and how we are acting and what we are doing then every moment just becomes a white noise filled blur. We look back and wonder how we got here.
That protective plastic film that comes on our new watch or new screen is supposed to be peeled off. If we don’t consciously engage in the moment in which we are living our autopilot will take over for us. But our autopilot is like that plastic film. We are supposed to turn off autopilot and engage with our life.
At any moment during the day we can come back to our breath to reset, to become aware and in touch with the present moment. We can pause. When we pause we can remind ourselves that we are choosing the life we are living. We choose every moment over and over again. By not consciously choosing we are giving up our chance to direct our lives. When we come back to our breath we can ask ourselves what life do I want to live? Do I want to be positive and happy? In that second, we can regroup and change course. It doesn’t matter what happened in the second before.
That’s something we get hung up on. We think that it does matter what happened in the second before. If we do try to tune in and take back the controls from our autopilot, we become stuck or hindered by what has already happened or what we’ve already done. But that’s over now. You can change course at any moment.
Every moment, all day long, everyday, day after day, we can choose our life and who we are. If we do not, life will still go on and we will fumble along on autopilot. But if we want to be who we want to be and be engaged in our life then we have to wake up and pay attention. All the noise and details we are often paying attention to are actually distractions from what we should be paying attention to.