To know who you are, quit chasing and adding. Try restricting your activities. Your increase in focus will be more revealing.
By quitting most things, you give the remaining items more importance and intensity, and in their growth, you find yourself.
Tag: attention
- Theme: Growth
Find yourself by subtraction
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
Distraction robs you of yourself
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1–2 minutesIf your attention is captured, you cannot choose what to focus on. Without focus, without awareness, you cannot prioritize.
Others control you, blown about by distractions, prodded into place by manipulations.
This is not yourself. To know yourself (your values), you must recognize the impulses: of me, not of me, which takes focus. - Theme: Self
Distracted from enduring values by pleasure
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1–2 minutesWhen the impulse to purchase or sink into emotional distraction arise, attempt to pause.
The hedonic treadmill of pursuing pleasure means you must always be running faster, because pleasure and desire always requires more. Turning from pleasure, is there a more enduring (less transitory and consuming) goal you may pursue? - Theme: Self
Negative Identification
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1–2 minutesHow much of our identity do we form around what we are not? This would be negative identification, keeping us concentrated on what we loathe or despise rather than focused on what we love.
This is not a new idea, just one that I need to be reminded of on occasion: your focus determines who you are and the decisions you make. - Theme: Growth
The reward is reality
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1–2 minutes"Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality."
To be led away from yourself towards some alien thing is to encounter something independent of your consciousness. You cannot take it over, deny it, or swallow up.
(Quote and paraphrase of Iris Murdoch.)