Three of my kitties are stalking my toes right now.  They’ve mastered the art of living in the moment.

Hoever, living in the moment needs to be balanced with planning ahead.  That’s something that we’re supposed to learn as we get older.  The question remains, how many of us actually get past the stage of living solely in the moment. 

Yet even those who live from moment to moment sometimes prefer not to spend time with themselves.  They may insist that there always has to be music playing or the television on.  There has to be something going on to keep from having to face themselves. 

It can be hard to know who you are if you don’t spend time with yourself.  Granted, even though you can spend too much time thinking while listening to music if there isn’t much else going on, as a general rule that’s not facing yourself.  Instead, your thoughts go around and around like a little hampster on a wheel.  At times, the end result is merely anger at whatever your thoughts have centered on – for example, how someone has wronged you.

My goal for tonight is to spend 5 minutes with no external distractions.  I want to learn more about who I am.  The lack of external distractions can help in other ways.  Sometimes you need these external distractions to go, so you can determine which negative voices are still affecting you.  Whether it’s the kids at school who picked on you, or something that your friend said that hurt in ways that they didn’t intend.  These thoughts can sometimes live on well past when you think you’ve forgiven.  These thoughts can hold us back.  We need to learn to turn these negative thoughts into positive ones.

The ones that stick in my head are from someone I was close to after high school.  This person called me stupid, lazy, & fat cow among other things.  I thought I had forgiven.  I vowed 7 years ago that I would no longer allow this person to live rent free in my head.  However, my subconscious hasn’t forgotten.  When I start making plans or a list of projects, the word lazy comes to mind.  When I want to do well at something, the word stupid comes to mind.

The last thing I am is lazy or stupid.  I know this, and continue to work on the negative reinforcement that I received when I was young.  One day soon, those words will be replaced by other words.  As an example, I can use the comments of the editors at the company I write for.  They’ve said several times that my articles are well-researched and virtually error free grammatically.  That’s not stupidity, that’s something else.  Something I can be proud of.