One of my new favorite things to do is to download and listen to podcasts while I'm doing cardio. I am kind of tired of listening to the radio, and I'm a little short on time for reading, so I figured the next best thing (and way to keep feeding my seek-aholic brain) would be to listen to people talk.
Yesterday, I was listening to an interview by Dhrumil from www.welikeitraw.com. He was interviewing Dr. Alejandro Junger (remember the guy who wrote Clean?). By the way, I'm still totally sold on the Cleaning/Detoxing idea, but I have more opinions now that I've "read" 3 more books after Clean on the same topic. I'll save that for later.
Anyway, Dr. Junger talked about his life, and progression of events that led him to developing the Clean program and writing the book. It was interesting, but one thing that really stuck out to me was a conversation he talked about that he had with a spiritual leader at an Ashram in upstate NY. He spent time there before and after going to India to practice medicine. When he returned to the states, he was confused about what direction to go in life---he was widely known and respected for his cardiology expertise, but India also valued what he could offer them in the way of developing their medical offerings.
His spiritual leader eventually told him she had two pieces of advice for him:
1. Don't worry.
2. Don't hurry.
The point was that all he had to know was what direction he wanted to go (in his case, to keep learning and to keep helping people). If he followed this purpose, he wouldn't need to worry about what to do or how to do it, and it would happen naturally---he didn't need to try and make it happen faster.
It reminds me of wellness coaching because we are always going outside (backward and forward) of our current moment. We obsess about things we did (how we messed up and reflecting that on how we'll act in the future), and things we hope we can make ourselves do (intensity about getting what we want and thinking of the end results of not getting it---worrying about what will happen to us).
If we could just re-focus on what's happening right now, we'd be much better off. Worry is just a negative excuse to not do anything differently right now---let the world happen to you because you're paralyzed by what might happen anyway. When we look at things this way, we don't change our behaviors. Additionally, when we constantly obsess about what the future might bring, we try to hurry things along, usually involving some kind of mental process and intensity about trying to control things in life that we have no control over---or just plain hurrying, and making each moment intense trying to get to the next. If we relax, do our work and feel good, we're more productive in the end anyway.
So, don't worry, and don't hurry. Just take time to identify what's most important to you, and figure out how to mesh that with feeling good.
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For me, the critical sentence in this post is: all he had to know was what direction he wanted to go. Until I define that for myself, what I do is run around in circles - flip flopping from task to task. That results in hurry and worry.
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