
Patience is not the ability to wait but how you act while you are waiting — Joyce Meyer
1. A short lesson about perspective and mindset.
How many times have we stood at the train platform, elevator or pre-designated meeting point and waited?
Waited and grumbled.
How long until the next bloody train?
When is this damn elevator arriving?
Where the hell are they? We agreed it would be 10am and it’s now 10.15am. Grrrr!
The negative lens through which we see situations is what makes us blind to the opportunity presented to us.
In our “too busy being busy” lives, waiting time is viewed as another unnecessary waste of time, when in fact it is you that is wasting that time.
Recognise that we do not get enough downtime in our 100mph lives.
Seizing this downtime is the life-vitamin we all need.
- 1 minute to breathe
- 2 minutes to disconnect
- 3 minutes to reflect
- 4 minutes to look, smell, listen and appreciate
However, when we wait our thoughts gravitate to the negative.
We then try to diffuse this negativity through distraction. We reach for our smart phones to kill this dead time. In doing so we have actually endorsed this as dead time.
Dead time [definition]; FaceBook, Instagram, Candy Crush, newsfeeds, Laney gossip, YouTube, sports updates, notifications.
They all lead us down time vapourizing rabbit holes.
Instead, flip the switch and switch OFF.
Embrace this as a precious moment in time that you have to yourself, and seize it.
- Disconnect from your mental To Do list
- Reflect on what you are grateful for
- Observe the world around you and look for something interestingly beautiful or thought provokingly sad.
- Re-evaluate what is truly important to you in this moment, tomorrow and in one year from now.
This is your time to pause and to appreciate the precious moment that life has just served up to you.
Peace is in the emptiness. Emptiness is in the fast of the mind. – Lao Tzu

