Here’s a little game for you…..

Set a timer on your phone for 1 minute.

Now within that minute, I want you to look around the room you’re in and take note of how many things you see that are blue or have blue in them.   Write down how many blue items you found within the minute.

Now set your timer again and search for all of the red objects in the room and take note of how many you found.

Were you surprised at how many red and blue objects you found in your room?  

Did you notice that when you were looking for the blue objects, or vice versa, you paid very little attention to the other objects in the room?

I know I was surprised because I had never thought about just focusing on red or blue things before in this particular room, I just always saw the room as a “whole” such as “living room” or “workout room”, or “dining room.”

This got me thinking about how we humans perceive ourselves and our world around us every day.

We tend to have laser focus on certain patterns of thinking and seeing things around us don’t we?

One person might habitually to wake up in the morning and begin to focus on everything that is wrong about their upcoming day.

They’re upset about the weather, traffic (which I am KNOWN for having absolutely no patience with btw),  gossipy co-workers, price of gas, the slow waiter at lunch…on and on and on.

Then there is the person who wakes up ready to face the day and embraces the weather- “It’s raining…cool!  I get to wear my favorite rain coat and me coffee will taste that much better.”

or

“Traffic-yeah it sucks but, I can catch up on my audible book or that podcast I’ve been saving for awhile.”

or

“My gossipy co-workers;  I’ll just be cordial and stay out of their way the best I can.”……

I’m totally over simplifying these scenarios, but you get the idea.

The person who is always looking for the “dark cloud”, will ALWAYS find the dark cloud cuz guess what? 

It will always be there!

Just like our experiment of looking for red &blue objects;  if you look for them you’ll find them.

Now I’m not living in some la la land where I think life is all sunshine and roses.

There are a lot of shitty things happening in the world…no question about it.   And we all will experience emotional reactions to those things from time to time.  We are human beings after all.

But does it serve us to focus on the dark clouds everyday and all the time?

What if we tried to go another direction with our thinking and started paying attention to the good things that are right in front of us every day?

Did you have a clean bed to sleep in, a tasty meal to eat, received a smile from a stranger, noticed the birds are singing happy songs, the flowers are blooming, your favorite tune came on the radio, your kids or pets made you smile….

SOOOO many amazing things to shift our focus towards, if we really want too…don’t you agree?

The take away is this:  the way we perceive our world is a choice that is 100% ours….it’s up to us to define how we see it.