The sun is new each day.
What would be different if we approached each new day with surprise and wonder? Yet, we leave our ground hog goggles on and somehow blame everyone else for our condition that we have complete control over. In our most repetitive habits, if we could just bring an attitude of surprise to it, we’d see something different every time.
Life can surprise us over and over again, if we let it. We can get into a rhythm where at one moment things seemed trouble free, only to find out there are problems. We shut down. We give in and give up. We settle. We get complacent.
We build permanent habitats in these stagnant spaces in our minds/life/work, totally missing out on opportunities. We live far to long in our routines and expect them to deliver different results. We find disappointment and put the blame on our environment for why it is the way it is. When instead, we’re the ones we should be blaming.
I really enjoy Heraclitus for his honest outlooks. How someone from our long forgotten history can find relevance in today’s space of “everything at our finger tips” society, is refreshing. He reminds us nothing is permanent. As much as we want it to be, we can not let ourselves become slaves to our own assumptions.
He teaches us that we need to keep our minds open and invite in possibilities. Make room in our thinking for unexpected moments to have a chance to change us. Fast forward to a more current thinker Ursula LeGuin:
It is the unexpected that makes life possible.
Think about this…how has life surprised you? If its been a while, that’s a red flag. Open up more. Make a change to your current situation that will allow for unexpected things to happen. If something changed in your current situation, would it really surprise you? Or, you deadened to any problems that could arise?
A best practice perhaps we can adopt would be rethinking our issues. What do we need to rethink? Is it really as bad if you reacted the same day again, as you think it is? How can the idea you loved last week, get a new chance to shine this week? Find the surprise that lives in each day. Don’t become a prisoner of your own thinking and be ground hogged.
Shock is part of the surprise spectrum-it’s just one kind of surprise. But surprise is actually categorized as something unexpected or misexpected. It’s anytime that you were wrong and your brain tells you about it. – Tania Luna
Here we go into the weekend, make it something special. Make it something you get surprised by.
✌🏻 Shawn
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