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Personal development: The day-tight compartment paradox September 30, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.
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2 comments

Sooner or later in our lives we will all likely come to the logical and stark realization that we no longer have time to realize all that we wanted to in life; we can’t do all the creative work we dreamed of doing; can’t read all the books we would like to; listen to all the music we would like to – we see the stop-sign.

For many of us, this can be an unpleasant discovery and a body-blow to our emotional, future-focused optimism.

All those things we have been postponing doing for future action are not going to get done.

But for those people who have, throughout their lives, practiced living life in day-tight compartments, the time limits on their lives does not present itself as a new revelation, and therefore not a shock.

By living one day at a time and getting the maximum they can out of every day, they have not exchanged a full life now for possible future enjoyment.

A paradoxical adjunct to the concept of benefiting from delayed gratification.

Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Allowing tomorrow to spoil today July 26, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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Unless we believe in the existence of time travel, there is no way the future can physically reach us today, yet we often do allow tomorrow to be with us today on the level of thought.

Inviting tomorrow to be with us today is mostly harmless if we restrict the practice to optimistic thinking about what tomorrow will hold.

But more often than not the experience is not positive, and is instead detrimental; because instead of optimism, we often project our fears and negative thinking.

We sometimes tend to forward-think a current fear, serious problem, or significant personal challenge not only into tomorrow, but into our overall future in its totality.

We fearfully think that whatever our problem is, that it will never go away, that it will never be solved.

This harmful thinking tendency can result from focussing to the point of obsession about the existence and parameters of the problem itself instead of taking any action steps, or making even a beginning intellectual effort towards considering possible solutions to the problem.

“What’s the use?”

We all can get trapped into this loop, particularly if we are fatigued, “stressed out” or at a low energy level due to unhealthy eating habits, or insufficient sleep.

For each of us to break this habit will take a lot of internal work.

It’s an ongoing process, but starts with recognizing the logical reality that most of our problems, even the very tough ones, have some form of solution.

—  Dennis Mellersh