A big part of mindset and state of mind in our lives is simply what we choose to pay attention to.
I mean, we’re all living in this kind of bubble of the things that we specifically pay attention to.
There’s so much in the world outside that that we just- we’re not aware of it going on all the time.
There’s so many details, we can’t think about everything.
So if we get trapped in a bubble of bad thoughts, that makes things bad.
And if we focus on bad things, we’re going to have a bad mindset.
Focus on good things: that can lead us towards a good mindset.
So simply choosing what to pay attention to.
This can often go into the mistake of simply ignoring bad things, and letting them grow and become worse, because “Oh, I don’t want to think about bad things.” But we can still choose to focus our energy and attention towards things that are good, and that takes us closer to a good mindset.
Then there’s the idea of how do we look at time? Time is something that certainly can play with our mindset, and it’s one of those basic things, because time is kind of this construction that we build.
Things happen, things change, as things- you know, time goes on.
But this whole idea of how we look at time, and what does it mean for time to have- what role does time play, and what does it mean? How do we interpret it? There’s so much room for interpretation.
The way we look at the past and the future, especially, are these enormous constructs in our mind.
So to be able to use this construct in a useful way for ourselves can be very powerful.
And ultimately, to just kind of let go of past and future and not be too focused in them.
To simply let ourselves live in the present.
As much as we can work with past and future to help us, to not get lost in them as concepts, and to simply live in the present.
Then when it comes to the whole idea of fear and risk: that’s something that can can keep us in a trapped, small state of mind if we are just too full of fear and unwilling to do anything new.
And for that, I find the most helpful thing is just to remember that nothing is ever safe.
So this fear of risk, this fear of doing anything that’s not safe, clinging to safety: if that goes too far, we can just remember that we can never be perfectly safe, and so we always accept risks.
Even if we do the apparently safest thing with our time, we’re still exposing ourselves to risks, and there’s no way without that, there’s no way to avoid that, so that simply is taking on risk, facing some kind of danger, is always going to be part of living.
Then when it comes to mindset, I then talk about some kind of different kind of metaphors we can use to imagine what it’s like to kind of balance out our state of mind.
Like sometimes I think it’s like cooking, and it’s like alchemy.
We have all these different ingredients, and we’re sort of balancing them and mixing them together in creative ways.
We have so many things going on in our mindset.
We have all our notions that we have about how the world works.
We have all the feelings that are coming up.
We have the new information, the experiences, physical sensations, mental sensations: all these things are all mixing in new combinations at all times, and we can kind of work with them and mix them and cook them to kind of make the mindset that we want.
And sort of balancing out different extremes.
Like you know, being too hard or too soft.
And you know, being too open, too closed.
And like sort of mixing and balancing the different conditions, the different states of mind, into making some kind of harmonious whole.
And so I like working with that kind of metaphor for our mindset.
And the idea of well, after all this, I eventually come down to the idea of what do we know? Knowing nothing.
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Everything is always changing, everything is always partial information, and we’re working with this, just doing the best we can with this constantly changing situation.
And that’s the ongoing challenge and the joy of having our mindset and as we go through life.
And in the end of all this, eventually, I think one of the keys to mindset, to having this happy mindset: there always has to be an element of humour.
There has to be- there’s a limit of taking yourself too seriously.
It becomes very brittle, and it becomes sort of- it loses touch with with reality.
It becomes trying too hard to be a certain way.
And laughter just completely lets go of that and lets things unfold as they are.
It’s just acknowledging the limits of everything, and the limits of even our ability to figure things out.
Just letting it all go and just laughing, because this whole thing, it’s pretty silly, it’s pretty hard to figure out what the point of it all is, it’s such a mix of different things that are so contradictory, and all these are going together.
And eventually we just have to laugh.
And so that would be the final ingredient that I would add in order to bring together this paradise mindset.
#attitude #mindset #stateofmind