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Patience: My Word of 2018
Gretchen Rubin’s Happier podcast has been one of my favorites for a long time, and recently Gretchen and Elizabeth inspired me to choose a word of the year for 2018. Normally I would deliberate over a decision like this for days or weeks, come up with a few options, have trouble narrowing my options down, end up choosing several, and then having trouble committing fully to any of them. This year, however, I found one that resonated right away, so I decided not to over-think it. Patience. I need it. I haven’t mastered it. Ever. And this is a year when I’ll require more than I’ve perhaps ever required before.…
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Being Present Vs. Being Goal-Oriented
Are they at odds? That’s what I’ve been wondering. I’ve been trying to live “in the moment” and to focus on being present and being mindful. However, my nature is to obsess about the future, to carefully plan and ponder and set goals and worry and live in a constant state of anticipation over what’s to come. (Usually pensive anticipation.) I have no desire to avoid being goal-oriented. I fear that this would result in finding myself ten years from now in exactly the station in life as today. And that’s something I don’t want. There’s something about the idea of “living in the moment” that makes it sound as…
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Finding Happiness by Knowing Yourself Better
Or: All I Really Want is Healthy Food and a Good Run I’ve spent a good bit of my life searching for happiness and assuming that it would arrive in the form of the attainment of traditional goals like career success. I have been living with the subconscious belief system that happiness will be a destination, even though my brain knows better. Happiness is in the things we do every day. And if you can’t find it now, then it’s time to make changes! One of the biggest road blocks between me and happiness has been a failure to identify what makes me happy. If you don’t take the time to figure out…
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The Weekend Long Run: Mindfulness on the Run
I asked in a previous post, (or maybe I just thought it to myself), whether running itself was the same as meditation. I suppose it depends a lot on how you do it. It may not necessarily be meditation, but if you think about it, running should always be done mindfully. In fact, distracted running could be seriously dangerous in a plethora of ways from the mild and hilarious to the breathtakingly sobering. For example, a misstep at dusk over a crack in the sidewalk could lay you out on your face. I’ll never forget the first time this happened to me. I was a freshman in college, and I had just…
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My Monotasking Manifesto: 6 Ways I’m Stepping Up My Game This Year
Have you heard the buzz about monotasking yet? If you haven’t, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. We, the strivers for productivity, are no longer expected to multitask! That’s right, “multitasking” is so out, and “monotasking” is in. Smart people are telling us that if we really want to be more productive, the key isn’t trying to do more things at once. The key is giving one thing your full focus, doing it once, doing it right, and then moving on to the next thing. And this year, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to embrace monotasking. I first heard the term “monotasking” in Mindful Magazine. Monotasking is basically a…
