Cause and Effect

 “Thought is Cause; experience is Effect. If you don’t like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.”

Marianne Williamson, Return to Love

“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

My thoughts on the nature of my thinking:
I am better today than I was yesterday because... everyday there are opportunities to be a better me and all I have to do is to change the nature of my thinking. It is that easy and yet harder than hard to do. 

Today I get to make doing mundane chores a delightful experience, which makes better use of my time than rushing through them feeling resentful because the list of busy things I need to do is consuming my thoughts. I can choose to make doing any chore a conscious activity that I am going to be the best at in that moment and take pleasure in the results. This feels like kindergarten level change in nature of thinking, a worthy and practical place to practice.

When I read the news I get to choose how I think about it. Today I get to think about the individuals and groups I read about as people. That all of these people came into this life as infants immediately catapulted into vastly different environments, circumstances and with different influences and, just like me, all these people are doing the best they can given the nature of their thinking. I can choose not to think about how wrong I thing they are and the negative direction I think humanity and the world is heading. If I'm having trouble seeing where I can learn something from people and activities I think are completely wrong, then my desire to be right is stronger than my desire to learn. Recognizing this leads me to an opportunity to become more of the person I wish to be. This seems like university level change, but its my choice there are no rules.

Action this week:  

To wash up my dishes by hand for a week. I do not know whether this is the most effective for electricity consumption, but it seems to me that the household appliances originally touted as conveniences have become necessities and, rather than wondering when someone is going to invent a dishwasher that will unload itself, I'd like to take the time to recognize and be appreciative of what it does... and I'm going to take pride in doing the dishes to the best of my ability because what is the point in doing something I don't take pride in.

I'm calling this action: Putting my energy into being grateful for things I take for granted.

Cheers

Jeanne