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Not for nothing, but when people speak of living an "intentional life," they're talking about exercising the power to choose. The power to choose is the only "power" that exists other than in physics. Everything else is authority, and it's just habit that calls it "power."
Most of our lives are lived on auto. Thinking is hard, and requires energy. Nature is efficient. If you had to think about every little thing, you'd never get anything done. Behaviors are habituated for a good reason, but it can lead to bad results.
The enabling faculty for exercising the power to choose is attention. Attention is a finite resource; and incredibly valuable, so an early lesson is to pay attention to what you're paying attention to. It's like a muscle, if you exercise it, it'll strengthen. Best practice?
Meditation. That's the practice that helps you disconnect from the unreliable narrator in your head. Self-talk is mostly just some circuits in your brain idling. It's nearly all habituated, and largely meaningless. But if it's negative, it can hurt you. So, pay attention.
By practicing meditation, learning to pay attention to where your attention is, you can widen the space between stimulus and response, which is where you'd like to live most of the time. It's difficult, and it's not necessary to inhabit that space 24/7. But it is important.
The power to choose is a very weak power. Behavioral scientists have conducted experiments on willpower. Because it requires energy, when you use some of it, there's less available until you're refilled the tank. But attention can help you use it efficiently, like better mpg.
The power to choose is like gravity. Gravity is the "weakest" of the four fundamental forces of the universe. But it keeps the whole thing together, so to speak. We are not the "masters of our fate," or the "captains of our souls," but we're not helpless automatons either.
If you try to cling to that impossible standard, you'll be setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. But you can learn to use your power and do so more effectively. And, in my case, it's made an enormous difference in the experience of my life.
Not that I get it right all the time. In fact, today I'd say I'm pretty far removed from the person I was when I was best at it. But, back then, it was almost a matter of survival. Things aren't as hard today. Which is good, but it can mean kinda going to sleep, which may not be.
And this isn't a call to worship at the altar of "personal responsibility." That would be an error. Everything in life is connected, it's all contingent. None of us got to choose our parents. We're all in this together, and at the end of the day, all we truly have is each other.
But the experience of our lives is accessible to us, we have some measure of control we can learn to exercise. And we profit and prosper from it when we do, and so do those around us.
So, anyway, that was on my mind this morning.
Carry on.
So, anyway, that was on my mind this morning.
Carry on.
