In This Edition:
1. April Showers
2. What Fills Your Days and Why?
3. Looking Beyond
4. What Are You Busy About?
5. A Litle Humor from Dave Barry
April Showers
As a University of Connecticut alumnus I never dreamed that decades after
graduating, my school would become the powerhouse of NCAA basketball, but
it's happened. When I attended UConn, we played in the Yankee Conference
against schools like the University of Maine where a moose in snow shoes
coached the team (just kidding). Oh, to be a Husky fan and in both men's and
women's basketball to be the last teams standing in 2004!
What Fills Your Days and Why?
The Middleton Media study conducted at Ball State University reveals that
the typical American adult is connected to the media, including Internet and
print media, for a staggering 15 hours a day! [Note includes overlapping
such as surfing the net while having a television on in the same room.] With
all the news and information that each of us absorbs, is it becoming harder
simply to function as a human being? Could be.
My sister Nancy is a behavioral psychologist who works with clients in
therapy to determine, among other things, how they spend their days. "It's a
significant clue to whatever type of dysfunctioning they may be
experiencing," she reports. Tell me how you spend your time, and I'll tell
you what your troubles are.
A wheel stuck in the mud, spinning fast, certainly represents rapid motion.
Yet the car is not moving. Are your days filled with activity but not the
experiences and accomplishments you'd like to enjoy?
When you examine the broad canvas of your life, interesting surprises often
surface. What you say is important to you isn't on your schedule. What you
say you dislike is where you expend your energies.
Busy or not, everyone has 168 hours a week. I checked. One way or another,
everyone fills them. Consider the cumulative amount of years you spend
doing various activities. Any activity consuming 30 minutes of your day,
consumes two solid years of your life. During a work life of 48 years (from
ages 22 and 70), an activity that you engage in for an average of 30 minutes
each day consumes one complete year of your life: (½ hr in 24 hours) = (½ yr
in 24 years) = (1 yr in 48 years).
The realization that what you do for only 30 minutes on a daily basis costs
you one solid year in the course of your adult life is simple yet profound.
Obviously, there are some things you would not or could not give up, and it
is silly to apply this arithmetic to activities such as personal hygiene.
Nevertheless, you have a new perspective for viewing what you do that can
aid you in eliminating activities that do not support you. It also
underscores the importance of taking control -- looking for new ways of
accomplishment and questioning your routines.
Reading the paper each morning is okay. Watching the eleven o'clock news
every night is fine if it's your continuing choice. Simply recognize that
you are making a decision that could affect your breathing space!
Looking Beyond
A friend of mine, who I will call Elliott, feels anxious when he doesn't
keep up with the latest news. While driving, he frequently tunes to the
all-news radio station. He doesn't read the paper daily, but he always
scans the front page. After work, he vigorously surfs the net and catches
the evening news or the late night report.
Elliott is caught in a trap. He is experiencing anxiety associated with the
fallacy of keeping posted. It is of no consequence to Elliott to hear daily
reports on a Midwest mayor being investigated for corruption, or a movie
with a new sordid twist on an old theme, or the four alarm fire last night
in the next town.
Still, as the years pass, Elliott consumes thousands of hours in his life
ingesting such information and being buffeted by the other mega-realities,
while not accomplishing what he wants, and continually feeling as if he has
no breathing space.
If, like Elliott, time-pressure has been a lingering issue for you, look
beyond routine, ritual, and victimization to ownership and responsibility
for what is occurring in your life:
- Ritual is routine behavior that is comfortable but outmoded and
unrewarding -- such as opening all the mail you receive.
- Victimization is believing that circumstances or others cause your
lack of breathing space. It's continuing to act powerless rather than take
responsibility. (My boss, spouse, father, mother, kid, in-law, neighbor,
landlord, advisor, clergy, President, governor, newspaper/magazine
columnist, ISP, or the devil makes me do it...)
- Ownership is laying claim and accepting full responsibility for what
occurs in your life.
What Are You Busy About?
Can you imagine Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. getting up in
the morning and lamenting about all the things they wanted to accomplish
that day or week? Indeed, can you envision anyone of major accomplishment
attempting to proceed in life following someone else's priorities?
Can you picture anyone of lasting accomplishment engaging in personally
hazardous sleep patterns, talking faster, or buying speed-listening tapes?
Flooding your senses is the prescription for trouble, not accomplishment,
and certainly not breathing space.
If you can look beyond your own routines, your rituals, and your feelings of
victimization, your quest becomes one of taking several days and deciding
what's important to you. This is intensely personal and can be genuinely
rewarding.
The happiest people I know identify and keep identifying what matters to
them and then allocate their efforts accordingly. If employed by others and
assigned what to do, they are fortunate to be able to make their assignments
among their priorities.
These happy souls are able to break free from collective, cultural images of
success and be guided by their own choices. Great leaders in society fit
this mold. All else eventually leads to some form of internal conflict.
A Little Humor from Dave Barry
With the Summer Olympics soon to be upon us, let us reflect on the
observations of author Dave Barry who describes "the guys of ancient
Greece." The early Olympic events were extremely grueling, Barry say,
especially the marathon. "The first marathon runner ever was a messenger,
who was sent from the scene of a great Greek military victory to carry the
news to the city of Athens, twenty-six miles away. He ran and ran and ran,
and when he finally got to Athens he ran up to the king, gasped out his
message, collapsed to the ground, and died."
"For a moment the stunned crowd looked down silently at the body of this
courageous man. And then one guy, way in the back of the crowd, deeply moved
by what he had seen, could no longer remain silent. 'Boo,' he said."
"And a couple of other guys, hearing this, thought it sounded pretty good,
so they joined in. 'Yeah,' they said. 'Boo.'"
This was indeed a historic moment, because these guys were history's first
sports fans. They had made the breakthrough discovery that you could be
involved in sports without having to actually do anything. Even if you were
a totally nonathletic tub of ancient Greek lard who sat around all day
eating ancient Greek junk food and couldn't run twenty-six feet without
falling over and setting off shock waves powerful enough to create several
new ancient Greek ruins, you could still pretend that you had something to
do with a sporting event by shouting uselessly and often unintelligibly at
genuine competitors."
