May We Have Your Attention Please!

Rubbish. Absolute rubbish! It comes pouring through my letterbox each morning like an endless contaminated spring.

Reader’s Digest says ‘I may already be a winner,’ Save The Slugs, or some such inane sounding charity, has sent photos of endangered gastropods, (I just couldn’t be bothered enough to read the details on the envelope!) And Gourmet Magazine is encouraging me again, for the fifth time this month, to renew my daughter's subscription, that I renewed three months ago. And if I do so within the next 48 hours, she'll receive a nifty little recipe on how to sauté slugs in garlic and olive oil! (ah, there could be a conspiracy going on here!)

While I mindlessly sift through the postal detritus of the day, the morning news channel is shouting caveats regarding a particular haemorrhoidal cream. Thank you! It’s just what I wanted to hear as I consume my bowl of bran flakes.

And as I contemplate how much the chubby little monotonous voiced Sky News presenter is starting to look more and more like the Stay Puff Marshmallow man, it dawns on me that I’m about to be late for a meeting.

Oh how I’m dreading attending. It will be like so many of the other meetings I’m duty bound to attend, but my mind will drift to imagining ways to escape. Perhaps I could just slip under the table and crawl out without being noticed.

Throughout our waking hours we are bombarded by the unrelenting attempts of people trying to convince us, sell us, warn us, and blame us. The majority of it is nothing more than static noise. And it’s certainly something that all of us would like to do without.

So we build internal body-armour to help tune out all these distractions. Some of us daydream; some of us possess the gift of simply being able to switch off. And it works well, once you get the hang of it, but it has a downside: It can become a blind habit. We can tune out indiscriminately, we can become inattentive to the cycles of life, and we can miss a lot of what we really should be hearing.

As so often happens, what may start out as a useful self-defense mechanism can unintentionally evolve into an act of self-destruction. By closing ourselves so effectively, we can fail to see danger signs and hear alarms, which might be leading to disaster. There's a better way to protect ourselves from life's intrusive interruptions. We can work to create a quiet inner place where we can hear the things that really matter, the things our soul knows and tells our hearts when we listen. It takes work, but it can be achieved. And when you do, you’ll find a greater personal peace within yourself.

Take charge of yourself. Spend a bit more time ‘inside.’ You’ll be amazed at what you hear and you’ll be amazed at how you feel.

And if you really need a way to describe it, perhaps you could just call it your spirit within.

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