1,2,3 for Week #15

Welcome to your 1,2,3 for this week. I had a great week of a vacation to experience for myself and my wife. Lots of hiking, being outdoors, letting the spring come to me in many different ways.

Your one thought for this week or, challenge should you can take it either way, is to capture something that really makes you feel great in some kind of medium. I journal and write for many reasons. One of those reasons is capturing what my moments day in and out bring me. Often times I will come back to film I shot or what I wrote from past days or even weeks, just to put myself back in those moments of joy. How I felt. The smells or sounds that came to me in that moment. What made that moment special is something that I can almost reproduce if I shut my eyes, to a point I can actually feel everything I felt when I first had the experience. It’s very therapeutic. It’s a form of meditation, sometimes even closing your eyes, to get that feeling of being transported back to that time or experience. Then I write about it, again. All the details in as many words as I can. Someday when I come back to the writing or the photo opportunity I took, I’ll want to understand how to be in that space again with that feeling. One of the best examples I can share with you is the podcast episode from this past week. I take you verbally through that experience that is triggered by me hiking again like I was a kid. If you haven’t had the time, check it out. Link: Step Outside, Take a Hike
The two stories that stuck with me this week are related to my vacation I had the recent opportunity to have this past week. While hiking outside I had to use all kinds of tools to find my way back. It didn’t not come intuitively. I wondered what happened to us, where as humans we lost touch with not getting lost. Animals don’t get lost, like ever. The first one is one from The New Yorker called Why Animals Don’t Get Lost. The second one, also came from my time away. We save so little time in our side hustling with work, family, and all other matter of things that take our time up, we save little for things we enjoy for ourselves. With a vacation, it’s easy to get back into our cares we had for ourselves. The experience of reading has been a part of my life ever since my father taught me how to speed read. But rarely, as an adult, have I found the same time to read, like I did when I was a kid. To just read for pleasure or fun. This piece from Maria Popova was a great reminder of why I loved to read as a kid. That “dimension of experience” reading fiction fed into my imagination, is something I have to bring back into my adult routines. Hope you enjoy, How Reading Is Like Love.
I picked up a few quotes this week from reading, listening, and being present while on vacation. I hope you enjoy the three I picked:

“Peace starts with you…” – Unknown
Peace does start with me. It’s a reminder, that if I want peace, I have to make it possible. I have to choose it.

“Your life is purchased by where you spend your attention.” – James Clear
We’re told this all the time. Yet, we’re so clearly not great listeners. Some are better at it than others. For me what this means to me is an important reminder that is I want what I want, then I have to make sure my energy goes in that spot of time to do it. It something that is not easy in today’s always on environments we live in.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. That space is how we choose to respond.” – Random Podcast Dude
Seriously had to record this in audio because I was driving, listening to a podcast at the time. What if you took 2-3 seconds between the stimulus of getting triggered, decided how to respond, then respond how you wanted to? Instead of what usually happens, stimulus, not thinking, and just responding. How much different would escalated moments be less escalated? We do have space. We just don’t always think we do.

I feel refreshed, ready to get into my new week ahead. I hope you found yourself a little more refreshed by checking this out before your week gets going. Hope something in here, is something that you can take with you that helps. Have a great week ahead.

✌🏻 Shawn