Why Your Environnement is a Reflection of Your Mind
A Simple Tool to Evaluate your Life
7 AM
The alarm rang with an incessant and annoying beeping sound. Mark snoozed it immediately, put his head back on the pillow to recover two more minutes of his sleep.
Startled by this comfortable and a very long two minutes, he opened his eyes wondering what time it was. He took his phone and it was 7:43 AM.
“Not again!” —screaming angrily while jumping out of his bed.
Scrambling to put his mind in order, he dressed up as fast as he could, brushed his teeth, and went to work…
After 8 hours of work, staring at a computer screen, he came back from work and he was exhausted.
Hungry, he grabbed the frozen chicken nugget left from yesterday. Mark always loved cooking, but he had no energy and desire for a more complex meal that night (and any other night). Not even thinking about it, he left all of his dishes on the counter and went to his computer and started gaming.
“Just for a little bit” — he thought
It turned out to be the whole night and at midnight, tired of gaming, he went to the room throwing his clothes on the ground and slipped on his bed, covering himself with the sheet of his undone bed.
The next day, the same thing. Morning stress. Unpleasant and unfulfilling job. Fast food. Accumulating dishes. Video games. Sleep.
The weekends came, and he was stuck spending hours cleaning everything up. A whole week of dishes on the counter and the sink. His full garbage can. He messy and dirty room. His cluttered desk.
He told himself — “Never again!”
Mark was messy, unmotivated, and unable to focus. His work always drains his energy. Deep down, he knew this was not an excuse, but he couldn’t help himself.
Even on the few occasions, he felt in control, everything seemed to slip away like sand slipping away the harder you try to keep it in your hand.
As he felt sorry for himself, he suddenly remembered something he heard a few years back.
“Your environment is a reflection of your mind”
Scrambling to understand what it meant, he realizes his dirty, chaotic and unordered environment was mirroring how he perceived the world. All the clutter surrounding him was the clutter obscuring in mind.
No direction. No goal. No purpose. Simply moved around by the whim of the things he cannot control.
At that moment, he decided to take control of his life, but, most importantly, he decided to take control of his mind.
He started simply by making his bed every morning. As time went by, he continued adding more and more things to the equation. A simple clean up of the room before bed. The dishes immediately after cooking. Measuring his weight every morning. He eventually started doing meal preparation, daily journaling and active tracking of his goal.
He used to think it was a waste of time and energy, but as he quickly realized, that nothing was further from the truth. He realized that his time “wasted” on himself and on his progression was a display of high value and self-respect.
“If I can’t take 30 minutes for myself, who will?” — he asked himself.
He decided to make himself his priority and it all started with taking care of the thing he could control.
His environment.
