A Bit of Pondering on the Journey of Changing Course

I was on a deadline to finish an article. The words weren’t coming as quickly or as well as I would have liked, so I decided to take a break to walk my dog Cokie. It was the first fall-like New England day of the season. We walked along a wooded trail not far from my house. While Cokie romped here and there, my eyes were to the ground. Deep in thought, I was busily editing the article in my head.

During a pause in the mental action, I happened to look up just in time to see a dazzling display of autumn color across the meadow. “Wow,” I thought, “I’d almost missed this.” That got me thinking about how much we miss when our minds are “elsewhere.”

It is not always easy to stay in the here and now. Our minds race ahead to what we need to do, want to do, can’t do, should do. When we’re not thinking about tomorrow or next week, we are thinking about what happened yesterday, last month, five years ago. We obsess about what we did, what we didn’t do, what we wished we’d done, what we were glad we’d done, and on and on.

There is, of course, benefit to looking ahead. That’s where dreams come from, how goals get set, and our true desires get taken for a test drive. There is also a time to reflect on the past. Thinking about how we might have done something different is often where we learn lessons.

But sometimes we spend so much time either three steps ahead or three steps back that we miss the part of the path we are on right now. I heard a quote once by Eleanor Roosevelt that ends with, “Today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present.”

I was reminded of something I had heard from a very wise man named Jim Mendonca. Jim described himself as a life long recovering head injury survivor. Surely his injury was no gift. But from it came some wonderful insight into how his injury has changed his perspective. Here is what he said:

“Sometimes just the way you look at and label things can have a significant effect on how those things affect you. Case in point, while recovering from injuries suffered in an auto accident, I realized that most of the time I was seeing ‘things’ in a very black and white fashion. I was either having a good/great day or a terrible/bad day. And many too many terrible/bad days.

Something told me that if I just looked at or labeled my days in another way, maybe, just maybe, some of the overwhelming bad days wouldn’t be quite so bad or numerous. I consciously decided and began to purposely say and ‘believe’ that I was now having ONLY good days and ‘other days.’ Not even acknowledging that maybe I was experiencing bad/terrible days.

And guess what? I began to have fewer and fewer days that I considered to be ‘bad’ days. After several months of this, I really noticed that the quality of my appreciation of my life had changed, for the better. Then, I took an even bolder step and said to myself, ‘Self, if this is the start of something much better, than NO MORE ‘other days’.’ Now I was only going to have good days and better days.

It has been over a decade since I changed my days to good and better and I can say that my physical, mental, and spiritual health and overall happiness index has gone off the scale. I hope that this simple insight can be of a blessing to others.”

Jim Mendonca

Thanks, Jim. If you are in the process of changing course, dream of a better future – but enjoy the journey as well. After all, it is all we have.