Awaken Your Day - July 18, 2011 - Focus on What is Yours to Control

" A great preservative towards angry and mutinous thoughts, and all impatience and quarreling, is to have some great business and interest in your mind, which, like a sponge shall suck up your attention and keep you from brooding over what displeases you."
- Joseph Rickaby

Time is a very valuable asset.  But, everyday we spend some of it. 
The clicking of the clock and the turning of a calendar page, these are payments from our treasure that we cannot avoid paying.  These fees are extracted naturally.

With that thought, it should go without saying that for each daily transaction, we would want to invest this payment wisely.  Get a return on our trade.  Priceless time for....something that is yours to focus on.

However, it is far too easy to get caught in the trap of anger and frustration in our day, and start spending our "money" without discipline.  Like the spontaneous buying section just before the cashier, there is always some little widget or gadget or just gotta have it that captures our attention and energy.  A headline, a rumor, an alarm clock that didn't ring sooner.

Notice the similarity.  Standing in line at the till you see things you had no intention of buying when you came to that store.  That was not your intended transaction.  And most often, neither is allowing our selves to becoming more tightly focussed on an arguement, a traffic incident, a bad report, a coworker that is annoying, etc etc etc.  We get drawn in...and then brood over the transaction.  Spending more time...more precious time, on repeating it in our mind, instead of repeating our path to a goal or special interest over and over and buildiing energy up.

Consider angry expression to be like a money pit.  And consider time to be your money.  When we focus our energy on expressing, repeating, expanding...our frustraions and aggitations...we are tossing our money into a bottomless pit.  Speeding up the clock.  Paying compound interest...on a debt that is often not ours.

Preserve your strengths, your energy resources and watch compound interest work in your favor...as soon as you focus your attention to detail, on those details that lift you up -  above the dark clouds that we encounter .

Good morning.
No time for brooding sorry, I have something else on my mind.

Pierre Couturier
Husband, Dad, Author and Friend