Читать книгу Satori - Keeping a Peaceful Heart in Chaotic Times - Jill LLC Slane - Страница 5

The goal of this exercise is to take an inventory of your current life, and pinpoint how much of that life actually belongs to you, to do with as you please. If you are like most of us, you may be quite surprised at the results.

To make a blueprint of your current life, take a pair of scissors and cut out several two or three- inch squares from a plain piece of paper. Now think about all the aspects that make up your life, and write each of them down, one at a time, on each paper. For example, if you are married, jot that down; if you have children add that as well. Continue adding squares to depict your employment, your hobbies, and your responsibilities. If you care for aged parents, put it down. If you volunteer, list that as well.

Think of every moment that you spend time at the grocery store, filling the car up with gas, helping the kids with homework, cutting the lawn and taking the dog for a walk. If you don’t have at least ten to twenty squares of paper filled out, think harder. Don’t forget holiday obligations, church or religious duties, Friday night dinner parties, babysitting for the neighborhood children while their parents are out of town, dog-sitting, house-sitting, work-related trips. You may find you have one hundred or more squares before you have finished. Now spread them all out on a table top. There! You are well on your way to mapping out your life.

Now, one by one, remove all the pieces of paper that have to do with obligations and responsibility. For example, taking long walks in the park with your camera on a crisp fall morning might fall into the category of a non-contractual, non-obligatory responsibility, unless you take a long walk in the park, but talk on the phone about business while you are walking. If that is the case, your “free time” has just become a responsibility…and it needs to be removed. Now let’s see how many squares of paper are left. Many of you might be surprised to find there is nothing left on the table! If so, we have some work to do! If there are one or more pieces of paper left on the table, it indicates an attempt to schedule-in personal time. Unless there are significant squares left on the table, however, you are probably recognizing that things are going to have to change if you want to eliminate stress.

The purpose of this exercise is two-fold. First, you have just laid out your life in black and white. Second, you can see just where improvements need to be made. We will revisit this exercise later, and you should be pleasantly surprised at how many more squares of paper are left on the table as you work toward achieving your goals.