My mother might have tried to teach me this when I was a child and maybe I simply never picked it up, but I have at any moment a choice and a preference and that, I have now found out (look here [1] and [2]) is not always such fantastic thing. I think the purpose of schools is not to teach us facts but to use learning of facts as a means to find out about ourselves, about the way we function, about the way other people function, about how the world functions and, just as importantly, to cultivate good habits.
I went thru a bit of a stressful time a little while ago, and realised that the sheer momentum of good habits would have seen me thru (pushed me out of?) some of the stickiness I found myself in. Unfortunately, I had not invested in creating good habits. We are all creatures of habits, we must be aware and conscious of them, and continuously weed out the bad ones... There are a few terrible ones in me - when to sleep and when to wake up and whether or not to have breakfast and lunch and dinner and fruit are all choices that i have[3]; sometimes i choose whether or not to take responsibility (when it is really not a choice at all); sometimes i do not live in the present but in the past or the future, and it is easy to forget you even have this habit till the past is suddenly a very painful regret or you have an insistence on exactly how you'd like things in future which leaves you with little but fear!
(I have some great habits too, that keep me from the depths of despair (as Anne of Green Gables would say) but not much of a point talking about them - I know what they are because I have come to rely upon them. But this is not the place to talk about them, so let's not. I have some neutral ones as well - like writing on this blog - and so on.)
1. You are what you settle for, you are ONLY what you settle for.
2. You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence therefore is not an act but a habit.
3. You do not realise the Self by attending satsang or by any other means; you only realise the Self by choosing the Self!
and a slightly longer:
4. Our [] perception of reality is tied closely to where we focus our attention. Only what we pay attention to seems real to us, whereas whatever we ignore—no matter how important it may be—seems to fade into insignificance. [] "For the moment, what we attend to is reality."1Obviously, [] things [do not] become nonexistent when we ignore them; many things of which we are unaware exert powerful influences on our lives and the world as a whole. But by ignoring them, we are not including them in our reality. We do not really register them as existing at all. Each of us chooses, by our ways of attending to things, the universe we inhabit and the people we encounter. But for most of us, this "choice" is unconscious, so it's not really a choice at all. When we think about who we are, we can't possibly remember all the things we've experienced, all the behaviours and qualities we have exhibited. What comes to mind when we ask "Who am I?" consists of those things we have been paying attention to over the years. The same goes for our impressions of other people. The reality that appears to us is not so much what's out there as it is those aspects of the world we have focused on.
[1]"There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation."
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/25/william-james-on-habit/
[2]"You need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. 'You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits,' he said.'I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.' He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one's ability to make further decisions. It's why shopping is so exhausting. 'You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia.' - Barack Obama on optimizing decision-making, excerpted from Michael Lewis's fantastic Vanity Fair profile of the President.
http://explore.noodle.org/post/31869759671/you-need-to-remove-from-your-life-the-day-to-day
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