Well, we can’t get away from the basic truth that things are always changing.
Sure, some things remain the same, and this change is very limited.
It’s within certain patterns, and it’s not just every day is completely different and complete chaos.
But at the same time, we have something new with every day.
Something has changed with every, day, and it’s never going to be just like it was yesterday.
So this thought can be comforting if we’re having a bad day.
You can remember that tomorrow is going to be not exactly the same.
Of course, it could be even worse, or it could just be bad in some other way, but it’s not going to be exactly the same.
But same when we are having a good day, things are going well, things feel good, we can also kind of remember that it’s not going to be exactly like this tomorrow.
So I find that when it comes to my mindset, it’s always changing like this.
It’s always shifting.
There’s always some kind of movement in my mind, that I get to a good state of mind and I can’t stay there.
I’m trying to do things better, have better management of my time, of my mind, my emotions, my body, having everything nicely managed and trying to do things right.
And so I can get into this little bit of a pattern, where things seem to be going well, but inevitably, that will always start to fade, always start to bend away.
There’s always something that will take me away from that feeling of contentment and satisfaction and the feeling of being on the right track, and then I can feel stress building up, some kind of frustrations below the surface.
Even when there’s nothing that I can say is obviously wrong, just there’s a buildup of stress, buildup of tension somehow, and then eventually leads me away from the good mindset.
I start to get into some kind of negative mindset, where I lose that feeling of being happy in what I’m doing, lose the feeling of being focused on good things, move from that focus on the good to the focus on bad things.
It gets into a grumbly state of mind, where I regret things and wish things were different.
And even when I know it’s not a good way to think about things, it just seems like we’re constantly eroding in some way.
We can never maintain this kind of perfect golden mindset, at least as far as I know.
So no matter what we do, it seems, we’re always going to be falling down, we’re always going to be falling short, we’re always going to be making mistakes, stumbling, failing, and losing the good mindset.
It’s just always going to keep coming back.
And I think sometimes this can be very frustrating, of course, if we kind of expect to be able to settle into a wonderful mindset.
We just kind of learn good ways to think and better ways to interpret, things that happen to us and interpret our own sensations and our own mind, and then it’s easy to just think, well, why can’t I just feel that way all the time? Like now that I get it, why can’t I just be happy and satisfied? But it never stays the same.
It never settles in into this golden state.
So it seems like part of what self-development is about, and a big part of it, is recovering.
We have to recover a good mindset.
It’s not about just achieving a good mindset and then you just stay there forever.
It’s like “Oh, yeah, I figured out the equation of the universe.
I figured out the formula, the right way to act, and now I’m good to go.” Instead we can kind of get hints of it, we can get it for a while, we can go on rolls and have patterns of improvement, but we’re always backsliding, we’re always falling, and we always have to just keep getting back on it.
And there’s something about that moment that really captures I think what self-development is really about, That’s the moment when it really matters, is when we can recover.
We can we can see how we’re going off, and then we correct the course.
It’s all about recovering.
When we start to fall into a bad mindset, we recover back into a good mindset.
No matter we could be mostly in a bad mindset, we occasionally get that glimpse of a good state of mind, and then fall out again, and then we go back.
Or we could be in mostly a good mindset and then sometimes fall away.
But really, where the tools come in, where the challenge comes in, and where the focus comes in is in that recovery, in bending ourselves back into a good mindset.
So I find it helpful to think about it this way.
Just to get out of that state of mind of trying to achieve a permanent, perfect, permanently good mindset.
Don’t worry about achieving a permanently good mindset, but instead be ready to constantly pick things back up, constantly recover, constantly get up from the stumble and go at it again.
#recovery #fallingshort #getbackup