Your awareness…

 

What you are is your awareness. It is the way you perceive and interpret what happens around you.

For some, ageing feels like a tragedy; for others, it unfolds naturally.

A job can be a torture for one person and a blessing for the coworker sitting beside them.

Clouds in the sky may worry someone leaving the office, yet for a farmer they are wonderful news.

The list could go on. Instead of trying to change age, work, or the weather, it is possible to change consciousness.

It is not easy, but there is already a whole range of awareness available to use. A person can be a mother and a manager, accessing the right consciousness at the right moment.

Returning to the examples, awareness may work in this way:

* As ageing happens, begin to refine your nature, reshape your personality, explore new interests and develop new tastes.

* Before leaving home for work, remind yourself why you are working, the benefits you receive and how meaningful it is for your life; walk into your workplace with that awareness.

* When clouds appear, remember the benefits of rain, find shelter and enjoy the fragrance, the soothing sound and the freshness it brings.

Shifting awareness is deeply motivating. So, when challenges arrive and you feel old, your job feels unbearable and you catch a flu because of the rain (and this article), that motivation will remain - enough to help you keep moving forward.

 

This is the last post in a series about motivation - starting from within.

The sunset of a life

We all know when sunset is coming… The Sun is above us, but it is a certainty that it will set. The same is for life.

At some point, we all reach our sunset point and it comes in this way:

We first realize life is on the other side. The mid-life crisis or just a complex series of changes in our lives, sometimes our bodies, makes us realize things are changing and fast. The best thing to do is to check our dreams and work on them very fast.

When we count years by Christmas and New Year… Well, I wouldn’t be so dramatic, but there is a point during or after the life on the other side period that we start to realize time differently. In fact, many of the things we used to love, we just appreciate now, and life is balancing in the rope of a routine. It is time to find something new, like being a volunteer.

And then, retirement! It should be a time for rest, but it represents an end for a big part of our lives. Ironically, at this era, less and less people are really retiring, but the mentality of this is the end is still around. So, what to do, living in pajamas from now on? Volunteer is a wonderful opportunity, with no limit in terms of age, but this is also the time to go back to your old dreams and live them, finally.

Then, it comes that point, that moment in which the car is not working anymore. It is that time when even to get up is a huge effort and it seems at last sunset has come. It is the time for packing up, forgive and rest deeply; but, more than everything, admires the beauty of the sunset of the great sun of your life.