We’ve all experienced something like driving from point A to point B and having arrived at B remembering little or nothing of the trip. I decided years ago that I didn’t want to do this life-trip and have a white-out about the details of it when I got to the other end.

Unifocus-webChoosing to notice our lives is a gift that has tremendous value in the moment as well as over time. We can become more of who we are by opening our awareness beyond the boundaries we have allowed ourselves until now. It is a cumulative process that imprints and archives in the recesses of our minds and spirits, images and learning that would otherwise be lost to us. By the end of our lives, we’ll be able to look back and re-gather life experiences just by our having ‘noticed’ them to begin with. We’ll be able to touch those memories across the ribbon of time, even those places that have remained silent for so long. We’ll call upon old pictures to tease what our minds have redefined over time…because the mind does that.  It tweaks, enhances, deletes and reconfigures events of the past.  It can create something more worthwhile remembering that way. Those old memories “should” hold our feet to the fire of truth for much of what we ‘remember’ is construed by wistfulness, and is exaggerated and distorted by the ego. Little white lies basically. Hmmm.

I was in my 30s when I committed to walk more consciously through my life. What began as an exercise, even before I began painting, became a very natural process over time. The annoying thing about choosing to be conscious is that when you fall into stretches of unconscious behavior, you are conscious of it.

To really notice our lives means that we first must make the decision to do so and second, to create a taskmaster, an invisible witness of sorts, who keeps a vigil on our commitments reminding us that we are dozing or cheating ourselves of the gift of ‘seeing’. Call it what you choose…the Noticer Guy. Sometimes, Noticer Guy only needs to whisper. Other times, a bullhorn usually works.  WAKE UP!

Once we commit, our observer’s voice will pop up often enough to wake us up to what we are doing, whether we are conscious of the world around us today or not.  Don’t sleep through the experience. Gather it all in and store it, savor it, be amazed by it, grossed out by it, grow from it, share it. Notice it.

We may not like some of what we see. Judgments show up. Visceral responses to things that bug us. The thing is, we can’t un-see what we’ve seen but we can change our perspective on what we see just by choosing to do so. No matter how ugly, gross, disturbing or “just plain wrong” something is, we can, over time, learn to see ‘it’ differently and from new places in the continuum of perspective because new information does that, wisdom does that…and time. As long as we are conscious observers and don’t attach hard and fast judgments there remains opportunity for that opinion or perspective to morph quite elegantly into something other. As all things universal, the entire process is dynamic and fascinating.

Good news. We CAN change our minds about the validity of ideas we’ve formed without sacrificing our sense of self. We can admit, even to ourselves, that we were wrong…and be OK. What we believe to have been the ‘wrong’ opinion was right for us in the moment we formed it. We can learn to see it in a different way and whatever the aspects of our perceptions were, distorted or not, they were real at the time and are still part of our memory bank’s options. As hard as it is to un-see what we’ve seen, it is also a challenge to un-learn what we’ve learned. Many of us learned not to admit we were wrong. We learned a myopic, my way or the highway operating style. Still, it is possible to unlearn… and we all have some un-learning to do.  Just sayin’.

          Judgment creates a labyrinth that complicates the path to creative inspiration.  

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