In the last video, I talked about how we can choose our values, choose what we consider to be good or bad, and that will kind of automatically move us in the direction of the good, away from the bad.
Even if it’s only a small effect, just the fact of caring about something, and you know, seeing it as a good thing, that makes it a little bit easier to glide in that direction, whereas seeing something as a bad thing, it makes it a little bit more awkward to move in that direction.
So that can already start to have an effect.
But there’s a different way I like to look at this.
You can get away from looking at things as being good and bad. […]
It’s hard to make that a clear decision, because things are so complicated, and there’s different nuances, different perspectives, and you go “Well, you know, it seems like it’s good, but then there’s these things” and “Well, it seems like it’s bad, but then there’s these considerations”.
But another way of looking at it, instead of good versus bad, we can look at important versus irrelevant.
We don’t always have to make this absolute good versus bad value judgment, but we can make a judgment for ourselves: how important is this to me? Is this something that I consider important, or is it something that I consider irrelevant? And this is a decision that we have to make all the time, because there’s just so much sensation coming in.
There’s so many things going on at all times, and we have to choose which of all these things going on are we going to spend our limited attention on and deal with.
And no matter how hard we work how hard we focus we’re always going to be ignoring you know over 99% of what’s going on.
So we have to be able to declare and judge and decide, at least provisionally, at least for the moment, that certain things are just not important to us right now, that we can say “OK, I’m gonna focus on these particular things and not on those other things.” So it has a similar effect to this idea of the good versus bad, that we move towards the good and we are kind of made a little bit more difficult in our movement towards the bad.
But in this case, it’s like things that we consider to be important, it’s like we become sticky to them.
It’s like there’s all these things coming at us at all times, and those we consider important.
They kind of stick to our attention.” It’s like, well, “Oh, that’s something I’m gonna pay attention to.” It gets caught in our- you could look at it as some kind of filter, maybe, or you could say it gets through the filter into the inside of our consciousness.
There’s always things coming at us; most things we don’t even let in; but then certain things, they get through, like “OK, now I’m gonna pay attention to this thing, because I consider this to be important.” But I like the idea of thinking of it like being sticky, so that certain things, when something sticks to you, it’s like you pay attention to it.
It’s like out of everything coming at you, certain things just are there.
They’re just like “Wow”.
They just grab your attention.
And “This is something to deal with.” Whereas things that are irrelevant, things you don’t consider important, it’s like they just drift right by.
Maybe they bounce off.
They just drift right through, almost like you’re not even there.
And you can really see.
It’s amazing to see this with different people and what they consider important.
Just you can just see, certain people, there’s certain things, they just become very aware and focused on them when they come by, and other people would be like “Well, I didn’t even notice that.” “That’s just not even on my radar”, you could say.
And this may be a very powerful way to choose our priorities in life.
Without needing to decide whether something is good and bad, we can simply decide that certain things are very important.
I will focus on them.
And certain things are less important, perhaps even irrelevant.
And yeah, maybe I can get to them.
I can’t declare that they have no value and that they’re bad and that no one should ever pay attention to them, but just that for me, they’re lower on my priority list.
And there’s so much to do with those few items at the top that I may never get that low in the priority list ever.
And so even though I can’t declare that they have absolutely no value, essentially they will be irrelevant to me.
So if we can just pick those few things that are important to us, it seems like, as difficult as it might be to change our actions, all the other things going on, just by being clear about what’s important, we start to become more aware of those things, they become more sticky to us, and they become a bigger part of our lives.
#priorities #irrelevant #lifefocus