Seizing the Moment: Selflessness
By:
Dr
Leo Kady
Our continuation in the series on Seizing
the Moment, brings us to the final aspect, selflessness. To
truly engage the moment, one must be able to administer
selflessness so they can further themselves towards their
endeavors and goals.
Learning selflessness
Become totally absorbed in the moment by performing acts of such
utter selflessness that you forget yourself. Consider this scene
at the hospital in Baidoa, Somalia, in 1992: A CBS News crew
could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire in the
marketplace, only a hundred yards away. Within minutes, bodies
were thrown onto the floor of the makeshift
emergency
room run by an American group, the
International Medical Corps. Twenty died before anything could
be done. Among the forty remaining, there was a small four-year old
girl. She was clearly "bleeding out". There was no
blood
bank, no blood substitute. One doctor, a
pediatrician named Mickey Richer, from Denver, Colorado, calmly
took a intravenous needle, asked a technician to insert it into
her vein, and then drew a pint of her own blood. She transfused
her universal donor "0" positive blood into the small girl and
saved her life.
Heroism is an act of utter selflessness, and it is only through
heroic acts that I believe we become truly great. While you may
never have the opportunity of jumping into a swift river to pull
out a small child or running into a blazing building to drag out
a trapped family, you do on a daily basis have the opportunity
of practicing the same form of selflessness as front-page
heroes. Those small acts of kindness go a very long way.
Many of us believe that
Karma is some kind of good or bad will that
indiscriminately afflicts us. In Buddhism, however, good Karma
is built task by task. In a lecture I attended, Geshe Michael
Roach of the Asian Classics Institute in New York emphasized
that we are not made or broken by life’s big events, but by how
well we perform the mundane small tasks. How you say hello, your
politeness in traffic, your helpfulness at work - each task is
building either good or bad Karma. Perform tasks with a high
mood, good spirits - in other words, with positive affect - and
you will create your own good luck.
Undertake them with resentment, anger, or negative affect, and
you’ll slowly sow the seeds of your own destruction. One of my
father’s patients, who had built a large fortune from nothing,
explained his success by saying: "Don’t spoil your success. The
surest way to spoil your success is by littering your day with
small acts of meanness."
Create a
vision and then enter into it
Entering the moment unlocks your visual imaging capabilities in
the posterior part of your
brain. And remember, the strongest, most
creative thought processes in the human brain are called visual
spatial, basically thinking in three-dimensional pictures
instead of words. According to Thomas West, when Einstein
developed the theory of relativity, he did so by imagining it.
Great poets such as William Butler Yeats imagined what they
would write about, creating a picture, then putting it into
words. Churchill was a visual thinker, as are many leaders of
the new digital age. The reason that visual thinking is so
important to positive thinking is that it allows you to run
movies in your head. The more you run these movies, the less
you’ll focus on petty concerns that drag you out of the moment.
I tell my son to enter the moment in a conversation by forming a
mental image and then describing it, as a sports announcer
describes a play. You’ll find that you become much more alive in
conversation than if you just grope for words. Describing a
picture in your head concentrates your brain in the moment.
Practice creating those visions during your
afternoon
nap or as you fall asleep at night. It’s a
great way to enter the present, forget the
anxieties of the day, and put yourself to
sleep.
Fight to stay in the present!
There are many forces dragging us out of the present. By
monitoring exactly where you are, fight getting pulled into the
past or the future. Below are two mottos to live by:
Don’t let the future ruin the present. The greatest setback to
living in the moment is having permanent anxiety about the
future. For many of us, a hypothetical future ruins the present.
I see this in the playground in New York. Amazing little
children running, skipping, jumping, and playing in the
playground while their fathers are standing by, cell phone in
hand, oblivious to the great joy they could share with their
children. Deeply
anxious about the future, the fathers are busy
making Saturday-morning phone calls to the office; rather than
living in the moment and recovering from a long week of hard
work, they’re tense.
Don’t get dragged into the past. Don’t let the past ruin the
present, either. Every small hurt and slight during a day, or a
bigger one in the recent past, can find us replaying the event
over and over. The setback could be missing a flight, getting a
larger-than-expected credit card bill, denting a fender,
spilling a drink, or losing a cell phone. If you’ve suffered an
insult or setback, you want to get over it and quickly get back
into the present. Try quickly to focus on what went wrong, why
it went wrong, what you can do to prevent it in the future, and
then instantly recover your good mood.
So seize each important moment of every day and live it to the
fullest and remember that selflessness can go a long way towards
that end.
Dr Leo Kady
Article
Source: http://www.articlerich.com
Dr Leo Kady is a retired physician and
researcher and relishes information in a variety of fields. Dr
Kady is an editor for uPublish.info ...
www.upublish.info . Please feel free to peruse more
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