About 20 years ago I went through a phase of reading those North American motivational books — Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Emerson, Tolle, that whole shelf. One of them was Nathaniel Branden’s The Art of Living Consciously: The Power of Awareness to Transform Everyday Lives [1997].
I read that book once, twenty-odd years ago. There was a section in there I’ve been trying to recall for a few weeks. I asked AI. AI couldn’t find it. I couldn’t do it justice and recall the exact words but the gist of it stuck — which tells me something landed hard enough to survive two decades.
So, on the weekend I went out to the shed and dug through two decades of dust and cockroach droppings until I found the actual book. The things I do for you.
The excerpt I was hunting for is below [you can find this on page 48];
The essence of our psychological freedom may be summarised as follows:
We are free to focus our mind, or not to bother, or to actively avoid focusing
We are free to think, or not to bother, or to actively avoid thinking
We are free to strive for greater clarity with regard some issue confronting us, or not to bother, or to actively seek darkness
We are free to examine unpleasant facts or evade them
There is a lot of value in the ideas in the book, I encourage you to give it a read yourself.
The message is clear – that whilst we cannot choose much of what happens in our life, according to Brandon, we do have the freedom to choose how we attend to events or situations. Our free will resides in our psychological freedom. The freedom to choose what we attend to.
The questions I have for you:
What are you not bothering to attend to?
What are you actively avoiding thinking about?
It might be time to pay attention to something you’ve been avoiding.
