OK, you love it, so what?
- List 3 significant events that have occurred in your life:
- What positive messages can be taken from these events?
- How can these lessons improve your future?
And I used some ChatGPT to help me look at a recent posting and help me think of ways to develop it. Here is a selection of things it told me:
- - You’ve identified a clear pattern (helpful action vs. passive harm)
- - You’re connecting a specific moment to broader questions about daily choices
- For Improvement, ChatGPT advises me to "sit with" these question:
- What made the birdhouse display feel so different from the milkshake cup scene? (One assumes people want to help; the other assumes someone else will clean up)
- - Why did picking up that cup feel significant to you in that moment?
- - What other “birdhouse moments” have you noticed - where someone made it easy to do the right thing?
- - What’s one small way you could create a “birdhouse moment” for someone else?
- ChatGPT provided some thoughts about how I could approach the ending;
- What am I learning about myself from this?
- What pattern am I starting to notice?
- How is this changing how I think about [relevant theme]?
- What does this experience reveal about what I value?
- What am I beginning to understand?
- “What would it look like to approach one daily routine with this ‘helpful action’ lens?”
Willy St. Give the Earth some Re-Leaf*
The Willy Street Coop newspaper has been publishing historic articles and images on its anniversary this year. (We became members a year ago and look forward to receiving the monthly newspapers.). The image above was publishing in 1995, which itself marked the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Willy Street was asking readers to commit to taking some environmental action and mark that commitment by writing the action in the leaf and then adding it to a "tree" in the store.
This appeals to me: take some small actions to make things better, commit to action, share it publically, trust that much individual work will amount to real change.
This reveals to me that I'm increasingly valuing action for the good of something else, rather than selfish self-enrichment.
Why is it so hard to be wakeful?*
Am I saying this is easy? No. Really mindfulness is absolutely the hardest work in the world though it's not work and we should think about it more as play. Why it's so challenging to be fully embodied and present and wakeful is a really interesting question. But the fact of the matter is it is that it's available to us any moment that we remember and drop in and inhabit the full dimensionality of who you are.
Why is it challenging? Why are we "made" (biologically or culturally) in such a way that it's so easy to be swept up in worry, daydreams, etc.? Why does it demand such vigilance and practice to be in a more authentic relationship to events?
The phrase "full dimensionality of who you are" reminds me of the current reading I'm doing in Carl Rogers about the healthy personality.
This is important because it posits the question - which might lead us to reflect on biology or culture - and provide a path to the goal of "fully embodied and present and wakeful"
Some Other Things
- The squirrel drinks at the birdbath in the early morning, the sparrow, the starling with ruffled feathers, a goldfinch, tinier than the others
On This Day (07/05):
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