This morning I fell down a rabbit hole of TED talks. I planned to drop my daughter off and then come back home to get some more sleep. I mean why not? It’s a Friday morning and I don’t need to be at work until 11…so I’ll indulge in a lazy morning. But instead, a TED talk on heartbreak caught my eye….then another! And another!
Shondrea Rimes talks about “the hum” in her TED talk and it’s epic and funny and inspiring! Oprah has an amazing podcast and I just discovered Andrew Solomon! Did you know how great he is? I spent my morning paying attention to inspiration and hope and I feel inspired and hopeful!
I have a fun little exercise I like to do with kids in my office.
I’ll say, “Take a couple of minutes and look around the office for things that are green.”
After a couple of minutes I’ll ask them to close their eyes and then I say, “What did you see that was pink?”
Sometimes their reactions are funny. They’ll make a face and say, “Pink? You said green!” Sometimes they can list a few things.
The next thing I do is ask them to open their eyes and find all the pink things they missed (there’s always something they missed!).
That’s when I explain that we see what we’re looking for. If we are looking for green then we’ll see it. If we’re looking for pink then we’ll see that. Some things are not easily overlooked and we see them whether we are looking for them or not. Our car breaks down, we lose a job or go through a breakup. It’s human nature to notice the things that are going wrong or might be a threat to our well-being.
Other things are harder to see but they are still there.
The sun hits the puddle just right and there is a beautiful reflection.
You’re craving a strawberry and you bite into the perfect one.
Your lazy Friday morning plan turns into watching inspirational TED talks and a writing session.
“When you really pay attention, everything is your teacher.”
Ezra Bayda
It’s all there. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the scary and the inspiring. You can see what you want to see when you pay…
