Todays Challenge:
Today, make the effort to live life with a positive outlook. Restrain from criticising the people around you. Dare to see the glass half full. Listen more than you speak. Give freely of yourself. Practice kindness at every opportunity.
Okay, so apparently today I am multitasking by:
- Being Positive
- Non critical
- Having a Full Glass (sorry did that yesterday and I’m still paying! – Pass – AFD!)
- Listening
- Giving Freely
- Being kind
After reading this in the morning I thought the best bet was to lock myself in a cupboard. But, surely these are things we should be doing everyday? An interesting part of this gratitude challenge in making ‘observations’ – this is not only of yourself but of those around you.
What is more interesting is the ‘default’ setting that your mind finds itself in when you are making these observations… usually accompanied by mental phrases such as:
“Arsehole”
“Dickhead”
“Why me?”
“No, I wont”
“Stop Talking”
Well, maybe not everyone has these ‘default’ settings, or maybe they do but just don’t notice. Noticing is really the hardest part.
I didn’t venture out much today so was relatively safe from my ‘default’ setting behaviour – but, it is not the behaviour that was troubling me (never really has – which probably is a reasonably good definition of an ‘arsehole’) but it was the thoughts that lead to that behaviour that are just “bang” there.
So a lot of the day I was grateful that I saw that my default settings were not on the above list (the first list) and that by noticing I actually realised I didn’t really think, feel or want that default setting – I wonder how you hard wire that?
I finished the day, pretty grateful and happy with how things had gone – it is usually a pretty dangerous place in my head, and I usually don’t go there alone, but, today I found 
that a lot of things I thought were carved in stone were in fact just written on my mental white board and can very easily be ignored (like a OHS lecture notes) or rubbed out with a soft cloth
– but, I am sure someone sneaks in during the night and scribbles them back up again with a crudely drawn picture of a penis….. Maybe it’s me?