Observing Your Schedule Level 4
I know many times that we have all made a schedule, and at the end of the week, we realize that we didn’t even keep a small part of the schedule in our lives. We seem to keep on self-sabotaging ourselves as though this is an addiction. We seem to have a willing spirit to make a schedule, but when we apply it the flesh is weak. We schedule a time to wake up in the morning, the alarm rings and we hit the snooze button. If the alarm has no snooze button, then we throw the alarm clock across the room. We have a hard time regulating, so we find relationships, jobs, and family that will force us into regulation. Even the dog has to beg us to go out for a walk. The kids beg us to play catch with them. The wife nags you to take the garbage out. We seem to be attracted to dominant personalities, as we count on them to regulate and schedule our lives. This is why we vote for dominant politicians, as we know they will do stuff that we do not have the willpower to accomplish. This is why we also find bosses or companies that are very domineering or controlling because we lack the ability to control ourselves. This could be why your significant other is domineering and controlling… because you have a hard time controlling yourself.
We say that we hate these controlling attitudes, yet we stay in a political party, job, or relationship. We do this because we lack self-control. If we are going to make a schedule for ourselves, this is something that we can do on our own. Why would you want to make a schedule that you want to or do not want to keep? Have you been convinced by society, governments or religion that you must keep a specific schedule or you must engage in specific tasks? If this is the case then we need to reexamine our viewpoint in life.
If you find yourself in a situation then let's go back to finding your passion, finding your tribe, and making sure that your direction and priorities in life are correct. You may find yourself in a situation where your choices are limited. This is still where you are at and you can make adjustments to finding your passion and creating your tribe. You may find yourself living on the planet Earth and not having a spaceship to go somewhere else, or you may be living on an island with no boat to leave the island. This doesn't mean that you are a prisoner or that your situation is limited. In all circumstances you are never a prisoner, you have millions of choices, and you may just need to make different choices.
You may have a job where you must get to work at 7 o'clock where you will need to get up at 5 am you prepare and travel to your job. This will require you to get to bed on time and get adequate sleep so that you can wake up and not be bothered by an alarm clock. If you just hate doing this, then you need to change your life, change your job, or change your direction. This is like living on an island where the sun wakes you up at six am every morning. You don’t want to wake up at this time so you can move to another island, sleep in a cave, or build a shelter that blocks the early morning light.
If you cannot move from the island, there are no materials for the shelter, then you will have to deal with what is. If we are always complaining about our boss, our parents, or our school forcing us to wake up in the morning, then we will need to readjust our thinking. If you cannot change your boss, your parents, or your school, then you will need to change your mind and readjust to the schedule within the parameters that exist.
Often we are addicted to failure. We will overschedule ourselves to the point to where it is impossible to keep the schedule and fulfill our promises. Then we will throw our hands up in the air and say “I told you this is not going to work.” “I am doomed. Life keeps sending me failures.” This is comparable to an example where I was trying to load a semi truck full of soft drink cases. Everyone was picking up one case at a time, walking down a ramp, and then walking 30 feet to set the case in the kitchen refrigerator. This was going to take quite a bit of time. I suggested that it might go a lot faster if we created a human chain where we toss the cases from one person to the other. This way no one had to walk and we could do this a lot faster. One domineering person told me that this was impossible because the person in the semi would have to throw the case to the person on the ground, and the person on the ground would not be able to catch the case. I told him that there would be no problem, I could catch the case if he threw it down to me. To prove me wrong he took a case of soft drinks, he picked them up and threw them at me as hard as he could. Needless to say they hit my chest, broke apart the case, and scattered the drinks on the ground.
This is like when you make a schedule that is impossible for you to meet. When you fail, you can tell your boss, your school, your significant other, “This is impossible to do.” In the example of the soft drink cases a friend of mine jumped up into the semi truck picked up a case and gently lobbed it to me, which I quite easily caught, and I passed it down the line. We had the semi emptied in less than ten minutes.
When you are not willing to change your schedule and make adjustments to reality, then this is addiction to failure. You must always take into consideration multiple influences to affect your ability to accomplish things in life. You need to examine you mental, physical, and emotional health. You may need to examine your bank account even though money is only a figment of your imagination, you will need imagination to keep your schedule. You may need to be aware of the weather, butterflies, and stray cats, that could affect your ability to accomplish your task.
Even though you have all of the time in the world, this amounts to 24 hours every day. Each task requires a specific amount of time. You will need to sleep, eat, and take care of personal hygiene if you will be able to stay on track and keep your schedule. You will need time for meditation, rest, and community events. If you do not schedule this time, it will be like throwing the case of soft drinks at your own chest, and then you say “See I told you that this is impossible.”
When we are making our schedule we need to use mindfulness to examine all of the possible outcomes. Using mindfulness, using multiple outcomes, we can use understanding to see which of these directions could take us. Then using wisdom we will be able to chose a schedule that we can handle and complete. This will require elimination. Just because there is 20 plates of food in front of you doesn’t mean that you have to eat them all. You will need to chose one that you enjoy, and that is beneficial to your health. You may want to have a significant other, but this means eliminating 8 billion other possibilities on the planet, and 8 billion other possibilities will come out of the outcome of having a significant other.
In order to achieve a goal or passion we will need to eliminate activities until we become a robot and an all-powerful spiritual being, it will be hard for us to do all of these things at one time. As human beings, we only have all of the time in the world, and we only have all of the resources that we have that are accessible to us. Making a choice can be very difficult. As the song says, “You need to make up your mind, pick up on one, and leave the other one. It ain’t often easy, it ain’t often unkind, but you have got to decide.
These lessons are designed to help you make up your mind, and learn how to focus your resources and energy so that you can accomplish your dreams. If you have a personal story on how you apply this in your life, please leave your comments below.