Hope you’re all well. Thanks for all the feedback and thanks to Paul for this week’s song and Wale for a video which I’ll probably include next week.
1) QOTW
"My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink."
Bankei, The Real Miracle
2) Story – The Present is The Gift
Multi-tasking is essential sometimes but I find it usually takes away from experience rather than adding to it. Maybe I’m just not very good at it. Case in point a few days ago
I was doing some research on YouTube. I was watching a video on the boxing style called "the peekaboo" mastered by Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson and YouTube now has a feature where you can watch one video while searching for another. This video was amazing, in fact I got so excited that I was looking for the others in the series instead of giving it my full attention and I missed a key point. So I rewound the video minimized it and again tried listening and searching simultaneously. I missed it again. It happened 3 or 4 times before I finally caught the info.
I already know that when I concentrate fully I work faster and more effectively. What I sometimes forget is that in addition to this presence of mind makes everything better. Everything. It makes each sensory experience richer and deeper, sometimes transcendent. Something as simple as eating a good meal or listening to the rain and being fully absorbed in it can totally transform the experience. It’s the same when I’m freestyling (rap improv), at my best I am just completely absorbed in the music, allowing the words to flow and trusting they won’t be gibberish. In a way I guess we freestyle every time we speak. The rappers I’ve met who have the most trouble freestyling are the ones who aren’t able to be present enough to quiet the little self and trust the big one to take over. You can almost hear them thinking, but freestyling isn’t a thinking state it’s a flow state, a state of awareness.
I remember when I was at primary school and the 6 weeks of summer holiday felt like forever. Nowadays a year passes so quickly it’s crazy. But I have a theory on this acceleration, I think the reason for this is that when we were younger we were much more present, we were completely absorbed in whatever we were doing and living each moment fully. As an adult I don’t suppose time itself changes but I think our subjective experience of it does because our minds tend to get more and more cluttered as we get older.
When I was studying Hsing-I kung fu our teacher would start classes with a few minutes of quiet standing. I’ve started to use this myself when I’m coaching and I sometimes meditate before I go to sleep. It invariably makes sleep deeper and sometimes it connects me with that awareness which Tolle says is beyond name or form.
"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have."
Eckhart Tolle
3) Song: Fort Minor – Right Now
Have a great week.
Dx
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