If you want to move or get motivated to move or do something, respond to your loves or fears. These two phenomena are the great motivators. Love something like fishing, and you’ll find it easy to go fish. Love someone like your wife, and you’ll find it easy to tell her you love her and bring her flowers. Love is a great motivator. I am very interested in love because I think it is the best way to live. A life of love.
But the other side of living in love is living in fear. I can’t say which one is winning at any moment, love or fear. But I see a lot of people that live much of their lives in fear. This causes some fear in me as well. In this time of Pandemic, it does not take much to see fear in society. And that fear motivates so many to act out of their fears instead of their love.
This is thing that concerns me most. How do we take our fears and turn them into our loves? Or better yet, how do we increase our loving responses to the world and decrease our fearful responses? I’m fairly certain it starts with our mindset.
Much of our mind is affected by our senses. The basic senses of smell, taste, feel, touch and see are going non stop and work more or less automatically, we can’t really shut them off. That can be a good thing, a bad thing. But it is a thing.
As you can imagine, what you watch and hear are quick and fast acting sources of information that lead to fear or love. If you watch a steady diet of sad, depressing, horrible news, your brain is going to have to work much harder to have a high level of warm and loving responses. All that tragic information goes in and your brain processes it and who knows what come out.
At some point, you can learn to take some control over what goes into your brain through the basic senses. This gives you some control or balance. Less anxiety, more peace perhaps. This is why you hear more people say they don’t watch the news, it’s mostly depressing. Or like me, you wistfully wish there were more people in the news business like the late Paul Harvey, specializing in news that motivated you through love and stories of love. He had some sad stuff in there as well, but he was just more positive and hopeful.
Should you turn off your TV? Maybe. But what will you replace it with. What information will you allow to reach your brain cells and how will you react to it. Do you run the risk of living in denial since you have limited your fear inspiring data sources? That’s possible. Denial is not the best place to be either, it can work for a short stint, but eventually reality catches up with you and you can’t deny it any longer.
I think the most good can be looking at our mindsets. Understanding how our mind works and the difference between Reactions and Responses. And there is a huge difference between those two. Maybe that will be my next post.