the off button

Mae West said “Anything that is worth doing is worth doing slowly”There will be times of regret in all our lives when we have acted in haste, spoken before thinking, or made snap judgements about people and places. These regrettable instances will by their nature almost certainly have occurred during times when we did not have time to do it any other way.

Modern life can feel like you are stuck in top gear with your foot pressed to the floor. We become so obsessed with getting there that we don’t enjoy the journey. We all need to slow down, living in fast forward is not really living at all and with no time to think things through we make instant decisions to show others that we are capable and dynamic. These decisions are often the wrong ones, making us despair when there is no going back and they cannot be put right.

The consequences of wrong decisions can make us afraid to trust ourselves to make any decisions at all and life can become one long list, upon which we always seem to be writing yet one more thing we have to do. Living with a constant sense of urgency is draining and all consuming, it leads to feelings of inadequacy and low esteem.The mind can sink into depression as a way of slowing us down.

We need to find a balance, to stop extolling the virtues of multi-tasking and to learn how to just be again. Only then can we take back control and create quiet, calm and unstructured periods of time to recharge and re-energise.

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over”

John Wooden

STAND IN THE COMPANY OF DREAMERS

There is nothing holds back happiness like a life lived with regret. T.S. Eliot wrote ‘Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened’.

Have you lived the life you imagined, have you realised your dreams? Did you try, even if you failed, or between the idea and the reality did the shadow of uncertainty fall and your courage fail?

Darwin believed that ‘A fool is a man who has never tried an experiment in his life’. It is not inevitable that we lose sight of the life we wanted in living. So whatever stage of your life you are at don’t let it be marked by a dream that is dying but by one that is being born.

It is never too late to begin again, to reinvent yourself, think of every venture as a new beginning, something you try may change your life for the better. After all, if you are at the bottom you have nowhere to fall but off, and that is just one flick of the switch to being back on again.

    "We are the music makers; we are the dreamers of dreams. We are the movers and shakers of the world forever it seems."Arthur O'Shaughnessy

STEP OUT OF THE SHADOW

There is an old Swedish proverb that says ‘Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow’.  I do not think it an exaggeration to consider worry as a greater master of the human mind than courage and ambition, and it can destroy both.

Each life is marked by its own set of disasters, great or small, some life changing, some just annoying, therefore worrying about disaster is unavoidable. However when you live your life anticipating misfortune, most of which never happens, then worry can become obsessive.

Being in a constant state of worry is a bit like grief - it is exhausting and all-consuming, blocking out light and repelling happiness.

The constant state of tension within which the mind and body are held, can cause actual physical symptoms and allow depression to take hold. So if this is you, put up the barricades now, use all your powers of distraction, determine that this is the year you don’t sweat the small stuff.

What we anticipate rarely occurs, and what we least expect generally happens, if you are a compulsive worrier the least expected is often happier days.