There used to be an advert for O2 which featured a talking cat who had dog characteristics, and because of this he was seen to be enjoying life to the max. And the strap line was ‘be more dog.’

But if this is taken literally, and we are to say you are a cat who should be more dog, we have a problem.

You can spend 10 years trying to make a cat bark, and at the end of that 10 years its going to turn round – if its still alive – and say Meow!

Spending our time trying to be someone else is just imitation. ‘Fake it until you fake it’, rather than ever ‘make it.’

If you are a cat, stop trying to be more dog and be all that is cat!

Be all that is you.

This is a fantastic speech which sums up a lot of my thoughts regarding what change work really is and what it takes to make those changes for ourselves – and a lot of the time its bloody hard work!

“Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human VALUE instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 PICKUP TRUCKS, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real VALUE of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Several weeks ago I passed a homeless man in a sleeping bag, looking pathetic and whimpering ‘help me’ as he poked his paper cup out at passers by outside Waterloo station.

Inside my head in that moment the words ‘make a fucking effort you helpless bum’ lurched out like a angry dog out of my control. Luckily I did not say it out loud but I still thought it.

It caught me off guard and attacked mercilessly. It seemed in that moment a terrible thing to think, never mind extremely ignorant and heartless.

I intellectually know this is wrong, so I attempt to lie to myself that I think it.

I try and push it under the carpet and not acknowledge it. To blame being tired or deceive myself that what I thought was actually right about this individual or the old cliche that I have to go to a job I don’t like, so why don’t you!?

But this is what we all do to some extent and why we never change.

I want to believe I’m a good person and don’t want to believe the thought I’d just had.

It’s not who I tell myself I am. Its not who I want to believe I am!

But the truth is, it is who I am……and at the same time it isn’t.

So which is it?

The only way to find out who you are is to enquire about the thought. To own it. To admit it and be with it rather than deny ever having said it or thought it.

Asking yourself what’s it really about, rather than resisting it because it reveals something none of us like to admit about ourselves or that we have these ‘terrible thoughts’.

However this was not my main insight on this day.

The echo coming back from my internal tirade at this unfortunate person, was that he was simply a manifestation of me.

A trigger thought said ‘that’s a projection of me,’ – of my inner frustrations in that moment with the stuff I was dealing with on this particular weekend.

I was the whimpering mess!

I needed to get up and take action!

‘Make a fucking effort you sub servient, permission seeking asshole! Stop skipping around the issue you approval seeking, acceptance begging cxxt!’ I screamed to myself.

Harsh?

No, not in this instance. Not to me.

Its what I needed to hear. Its what I needed to know.

It felt refreshing and liberating to hear the truth rather than deny the lies I had originally thought. Lies which without investigation, we spend our time reliving over and over or taking no responsibility for. Had I not enquired it would have been all an external problem such as the homeless man that was causing me pain. That’s where we live most of the time. Its never about us.

Its all to easy in our PC society to tread gently, gently with one an other in case we get offended.

All to often self development panders to the idea of being kind to ourselves and treating our inner child with love and tender care.

And this has its place, but at times we need a shake up.

We need someone to say ‘you need to get off the tit Jonny!’ as my old boss once said to me a few years back, which was the very advice and the catalyst I needed to make some significant changes at that time.

Someone who is willing to be honest with us for the right reasons.

If we can’t be honest with ourselves how can we ever be honest with anyone else, or hope that we are open enough to hear the truth when those that care about us offer us some home truths.

Sometimes we need to stop defending ourselves over the things we don’t like and be willing to really enquire into what’s actually being said, either in our own heads or by others and take a good hard look at the part we play in creating it.

Marshal Rosenberg, creator of Non Violent Communication (NVC) advocates that we must first check that what we want to say is in harmony with what we want communicate, then speak it. He goes on to say –

‘the more we try preventing people freaking out when we speak, the more we become nice, dead people’.

‘when you think the other persons reaction might be a problem, you are putting your security in their hands’.

‘Its our reaction to their reaction we have to fear. It’s not their response but how we receive it.’

Many times, (this blog included), I fear that I will be jumped on by thinking such thoughts, of being thought of as a nasty piece of work or simply wrong. Even my language at times can be base. But its how I think! So why wouldn’t I tell it how it is in my world….and from what I know working with lots of people, your worlds also.

When I set out to write my posts it wasn’t to make friends or get pats on the back or to sell out to an industry I find talks a lot of bullshit.

The sole purpose was to show that how we all think is not wrong, even when it doesn’t relate to how we have been sold we should be thinking.

When people start to talk about this stuff and how they think and feel it becomes apparent that we all have ways of thinking that we chastise ourselves over because they are somehow politically incorrect or apart from the perceived norm.

The irony is that its the other way round.

How we think is normal and what we are sold regarding ‘how we should think’ is actually wrong in most cases.

The missing link is often showing us how to be able to accept those thoughts and how to enquire into the reason for their existence in that moment.

We often feel guilty because of what we have thought or said because we are under an illusion of how we are supposed to think and feel.

I remember a friend telling me many years ago how just being noticed and spoken to like a human being makes a huge difference to a homeless person and I endeavour to do that. I buy tea on a cold day or share a sandwich on my way back from work with people on the street because I believe its the right thing to do as a human being.

And thus its what makes my thought at the start if this story so hard for me to swallow.

At times I am the man who does what he thinks is the right and kind thing to do.

But I’m also the man who is often frustrated and irrationally lashes out.

If I am to deny any of those identities or try to push one to the back of my mind, I am doing myself and everyone else, including the homeless man who instigated this story, a disservice because this incident will continue to happen if I simply block it out.

By enquiring into our thoughts we can understand ‘who’ we really are rather than ‘who our thoughts often make us believe we are’.

By doing so we spend our time becoming the person we wish to be, rather than the person we are pretending to be.

Our moments inside of emotional pain are often the best moments to understand who and where you currently are compared to who and where you thought you where.

Self development, like anything that has a end perception of ‘success’ takes a lot of hard work. The moments of ‘feet up tranquillity’ are far and few between, because there is no end point.

Just when you think its sorted and that you have arrived at your destination, that you’ve found your rhythm or your method which means its plain sailing from here in, something comes along to challenge you, to make you doubt everything you’ve done up until now and to make you question yourself.

Its easy in these moments to become overwhelmed, to ‘turn the table over’ and storm out of the room you’ve been striving to create, often over years and to never return.

However, its in these moments of often incapacitated frustration, anger and sense of hopelessness that offer a possibility to shed a light on how we can evolve and to really grow.

But where growing is involved we must be willing to allow pain to be our teacher rather than the enemy that we must close down and silence.

Easy in theory.

But theory in my experience predominately just sells workshops or at best, offers a very loose framework around how things really work.

It’s in the field, weathering those emotional storms that we learn practical skills, what really works and different ways to navigate ourselves out of painful situations.

And I know how hard it can be at these moments to sit there and be willing to be taught a lesson! So much easier to blame someone else and become a victim!

Its in these moments that its imperative to be able to de hypnotise ourselves from our emotional trances and to find ways to interpret their personal message about us if we want to truly develop.

Not only this, but as well as having a personal protocol that allows us to self reflect on what is always only an external stimulus rather than the actual cause of our pain, I believe we also need a way to release the build-up of stress and tension that self analysis, like any form of hard work, creates.

This way, at the end of each ‘life session’ we can drop any access baggage off and go forwards on our journey refreshed with an empty ‘neurophysiological rucksack’ ready to meet the next challenge a little bit lighter and hopefully a littlebit wiser.

Its always great to get feedback from clients, whether its from my one to ones, the readers of my posts or wearers of my clothing ranges.

Not only this, but for me, its even greater to actually see people change their lives for the better, how ever small that may seem.

For all of us, it’s important to believe that we are contributing to something greater than ourselves, especially when its all to easy, inside of the daily grind, to get caught up in believing we are going no where fast and that what we are doing day to day often feels insignificant.

The idea that ‘we get what we need when we need it’ rather than when we want it, or actually would prefer it, may seem a bit Zen, or even bollocks, especially when we are not in a great place in our lives.

But it often seems that when we are in a predicament, or contemplating giving up, something or someone comes along that clarifies, or helps change our decisions for the better.

I’m not going to get all ‘the Secret’ here and coincidence or chance etc are all big factors. However  I think we all have had those times when we feel a bit flat, or we are struggling to come up with a resolution, or wondering which direction to take next, when, what seems out of the blue in some shape or form, we get a ‘little hand up’ or something that just makes us ‘stop and think’ – (or gives us that little bit of energy we needed to get back up.)

I had one of those days today.

After a weekend away and the idea of doing some blog posts done, I really struggled to get over what I wanted to say and it even made me wonder if I actually wanted to say anything again blog wise.

That struggle and thought process eventually lead to a totally different post than what I had intended, but it did make me reflect on what direction I want to go in regarding my posts.

Then on my way back from the Easter break, whilst mulling over this idea, this popped into my inbox regarding one of my posts-

‘This is an awesome post. I always read your stuff when struggling for motivation to get out the door and exercise and again tonight I am putting off going to bed early so I can get up early and run. My excuses or ‘can’t be arsed’ attitude cannot stand up when I read your posts!’

I have to admit it made me feel good and that its worth doing after all’, and so I responded _

‘Like all of us, finding motivation or even a compelling reason to do certain things, even those we know may benefit us in the long run, is often a challenge, and one we all can fall short of now and again.

Its always good to have a source of inspiration where ever that may come from, that we can visit and draw from to ‘get us going’ again.

I’m no different, even though I write these posts, and still need to seek out many ways to pick myself up and rely heavily on new sources of inspiration and guidance.

And sometimes, just as it has been the case with this feedback, it comes as an unexpected package that answers the question we all ask our selves at times, which is ‘why do I bother?’

Just when we think no ones listening, or what we are striving for is going unnoticed and even seems hopeless, there’s that break in the clouds that lets us know ‘we can do this thing!’