WHAT MATTERS MOST

“With a little perspective you can live a life of Conscious Intent.”

Do you sometimes find yourself prioritising what you select to do by levels of Urgency? Or is Importance your primary motivator? Perhaps there's a rush job at work that has to be out on the overnight flight, just when you're heading home to have tea with your family. Does the Urgent get your priority over the Important?

Similarly, do you find yourself evaluating the results your actions by some personal hierarchy of importance? For example, the time you spend with friends is important, but maybe the time you spend with family, is more important to you. 

You might rank an hour fishing as very important, thirty minutes visiting a sick friend in the hospital much more important than the fishing, and a sixty-second conversation with a shop assistant as not very important at all. Of course you rate by Importnce. We all do it. But just because we all do it by default doesn't make it a good idea – except maybe sometimes.

It's imperative at this point to realise that your hierarchies of value and importance are yours; they are personal. You may have picked them up from others – parents, family, friends, teachers, social and cultural norms and such, but you make them yours the minute you adopt them. And then they adopt you, unless and until you become very aware. Let me spell this out for you as clearly as I can – you do not have your principles, values and hierarchies of importance – they have you. Until you become fully self-aware, you are utterly at the mercy of your own stuff (principles, values, beliefs, opinions, conclusions, fears, evaluations....)

Your life begins to transform in a very profound way when you finally wake up to the possibility that nothing matters, and everything matters. For now, let's explore the face of the coin that says every move you make counts just as much as any other.

For starters in this realisation, you will begin living a life of conscious intent, and that right there is a basic ingredient of experiencing satisfaction and contentment. A life lived on intended purpose will always make you a better parent, a better spouse, a more functional producer and a more valuable friend than a life that resembles thistledown. Your productivity and success will sound new heights and depths while the old days of flatline uncertainty, doubt, and depression fade into the past.

Any salesperson worth his/her salt will tell you that casual conversations in town matter just as much as an arranged meeting with a major prospect. Successful game-players and -changers see proof that every action on and off the field, whether he plays it or not, is as critical to the team’s successful season as everything done by the rest of the team. You can't sink or sail half a boat.

When a teenager has, in his early years, been given the opportunity to experience and understand that every choice made in leisure today will affect the choices that will be available to him in more pressing times ahead, I'll read a lot less bad news in the morning papers.

When one lives a life of permanent purpose, sales figures soar, team chemistry thrives and teenage decisions become wiser and more aware of consequences. And these are just a few examples of what will happen…Simply put, when we understand that every action matters, every result of our actions immediately improves!

The proof is in the implementation. If you wait for proof of success before you try a new idea, you could wind up waiting forever. Rodney Dangerfield quipped - I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

Faced with a choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone insists on the proof and ignores the dire and obvious need for directive action.

You ignore anything at your peril. You put off acting now at the price of a train-wreck later. I know from experience before and since awakening, that when you start doing what you mean, and meaning what you do, you give your life “meaning”. You not only find hope and direction for yourself, but also equip yourself to lead others to their own life of permanent purpose! Every move we make and every action we take, matters -- for us, and for all of us…and for all time.

….....AND.....

Nothing matters, too. But that's a topic for another context. I've been engaging with your mind for the past few minutes: and your mind can't deal with “Nothing matters”; another tool is called for. 

Another time, maybe?