Gratitude and Trust: Six Affirmations That Will Change Your Life

Guides, Mindfulness, Moving Forward, Right Action

WHO ARE YOU FOLLOWING?

 

I don’t know the difference between my left and my right. Well, that is not true, I do know; I just don’t always pay attention to which is which.

For instance if you happen to be in car with me and tell me to “Turn left”, I may take a sharp right. Which usually leads the person with me to ask, “Don’t you know the difference between your left and right?”

I’m not sure where my inability to sometimes differentiate the two sides comes from. I don’t think it’s my wanting to do it my way. Since if I need to go left, turning right only takes me in the opposite direction of where I need to be.

I think I’m just not paying attention. I live deeply in my head at times. I live in a place where right and left don’t require physical movement.

The same thing happens in my gym; the teacher will say put your left leg in the air, invariably my right goes springing up. This usually means the person next to me sticks their right leg up as well. And before you know it, everyone in the section in the room where I’m working out is using the wrong leg.

What is the point of all this? Aside from my owning the fact that I’m directionally challenged – most of us are followers in one way or another.

The girls in the gym are likely not fully in the moment. And they are either thinking about if that text they saw on their husband’s phone means is that girl at the office a bigger part of his life than he claims.  Are the matches she found in her son’s room a sign he’s taken up cigarettes or pot? Should she buy that skirt in the shop next door even though she has two just like it? So since she’s deep in the land of her, it is easier to just follow what the person next to her is doing. And if that person happens to be me – on the wrong foot, well, you know how the story goes.

We are lemmings. We follow. And we don’t always follow the correct things.

Have you ever noticed if a car is stopped at a red light and then it randomly decides to go through, the car behind him and maybe the next one follow suite and charge out as well? Brakes screech, swear words are hurled and hopefully no one was hurt.

We don’t always stop and say, has the light turned green? Is it safe for me to go? We figure if that guy or girl did it, it must be alright.

Same thing with pedestrian crossings, one person isn’t paying attention and darts into oncoming traffic and suddenly three people staring at their phones are right behind them.

In the gym I have learned to tell the people around me, don’t do what I do, you will likely end up on the wrong foot.

There are many places where we do not either listen to directions given, or to the rules of the road or the universe; or what we know to be right.

Kids are known for this, “Why did you do it?” “Cause everyone else was?”

Sometimes it means sneaking out to a movie; other times it means the first tastes of drugs and/or alcohol. Which could mean a few kids just drink at an illegal age, but for others it could be the first steps into the land of addiction.

People are followers. They like to fit in. They feel good with the comfort conformity provides.

It is often hard to stand on your own two feet, right and left. And do what you know is right, pay attention and follow the voice inside of you that is telling you what to do.

We all have that voice, the voice of reason, our HP, the one that says go left, not right and I don’t mean directionally. And we often ignore it and do what the person in front of us is doing or the person we assume knows more than we do. We may just follow the group en masse and ignore what we know to be right and take a big step to wrong.

I may still turn left onto a street when I need to turn right, and I still kick my left leg when the rest of the room is doing their right, but I have learned to listen to that still, sometimes loud voice within when it comes to the big stuff.

Call it trust if you will, trust that something, someone, somewhere knows my right from my wrong, I just have to listen, pay attention and not follow the pack.