Wash Your Dishes Daily …
You should never eat out of dirty dishes. If you do, you’ll probably get sick and that’s really just a form of self-loathing. Isn’t it? Not wanting to maintain and support your daily life is a broken and dysfunctional place to operate from.
On the other side of the same coin, if you never wash the dishes, and you just keep buying new ones every time you eat, you’re dealing in the worst kind of self-indulgence.
I wonder if you know someone who does these things? Do you?
From what I’ve seen, self-indulgent behaviour goes on unchecked far more than any of the other bad habits we have. Hence, the addictive personalities we know, or the addictive phases of our lives that come and go in waves.
If no one’s ever said it before, then let me tell you now — the jackpot of self-indulgence, like a slot machine prize, is depression.
Wash your dishes daily. Run the water over your hands. Stand there and be silent for a while and do the work. Don’t expect miracles. It’s an act that’s a form of self-help, quiet and meditation. It’s a feeling of ‘setting things right’ again. The world around you wont be improved, it will just be brought back to zero from the negative. A dirty kitchen needs to get back to neutral, first, before you can use it again to the best of its ability. And in case no one ever told you — that’s the best place to be. It’s actually the ‘path’ you hear wise people talking about. It’s the middle road through life where you find strength to not be affected by the radical swell of emotions.
Don’t operate from a position that bounces from one state to another, completely ignoring where you should be.
Screwdrivers & Flashlights …
Most of us in life are given the same tools to deal with our problems. When we’re in the negative, we all pull out the same screwdriver trying to tighten everything up to get back into someplace positive. We do this instinctively and put a lot of time spinning our wheels in frustration. But if this screwdriver we have for our problem-solving worked, we wouldn’t keep landing in the same spot. We would hope to make better progress the farther along we got. But we don’t.
The best thing you can do is pull out your flashlight and examine where you are. Where you are standing. What you are doing. The goal is to get back into a neutral state. Get things set right first. You don’t plant crops in an untilled garden. You don’t build a house on rocky uncleared land. Once the ground is clear again — work to get ahead. Skipping this step is where most people just glance at quickly, and try to power past without much thought. Operating from neutral though is where you return at the beginning of every day and the end of each night before bed. The weakness is in not seeing this place and not appreciating the powerful position of being in neutral before setting off to make things better.
Please keep this in your life. Think about it. Work on it.
