Daily Gratitude: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Can you identify with this? Think of a time when you were starting to fall in love with someone (or even something such as medicine for me). Didn’t it seem to take all of your attention? And I mean all of it. Day and night you couldn’t think of anything else. You just wanted to know all there was to know about that person or the thing. That would have been one test you definitely could have gotten a 100 on!

If the relationship continued, your attention remained on that person (it’s also called focus). And with that attention came devotion.

Look at musicians. They focus their entire attention on their instrument or voice or the music. Same with athletes.

Same with anything that sparks an interest in your soul. You’re captivated…and devoted.

Next time you see to be paying a lot of attention to something, ask yourself “am I becoming devoted?” And if so, great (well, great as long as it’s morally ok).

And don’t let anyone say things like “you’re obsessed” because you probably are obsessed but in a good way whereas they are most likely using it as a put down.

Don’t ever let anyone criticize you for being devoted. Just tell them to pay more attention and then they’ll be happier and can mind their own business.

Daily Gratitude: “Character is higher than intellect.”

This is so important. If you develop nothing else in your life, work on your character.

All you have to do is look at the list of names in the Epstein files and you’ll see all the intellect you could ever want. But how much character is in there?

Look at people with developmental disabilities. They are usually the happiest and if they can work, they generally surpass most of the other employees. That is character and I’d rather have them working for or with me than some smart bozo who feels he or she is above others either because of their IQ or their success. But they would step on anyone who gets in their way.

There is such a thing as karma which is why I stay away from people like that… in case of a karma spillover.

Figure out your core values and let them guide everything and I mean everything you do in your life. Hard work is part of character and that can get you further along than most other things.

Daily Gratitude: “Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

Although this seems simple, it’s not easy. But it’s so, so valuable.

This is one reason I recommend having a success/accomplishment journal (or cookie jar). What you really want is to plant those successes and accomplishments in your brain and soul. One way to do that is to press them into a piece of paper (your journal). There’s a kinetic and cognitive energy that comes from writing things down.

You have to impress joyful things into your being. And we all have them even if we deny that on the superficial level. Joy is a relative term. I had a pretty dysfunctional childhood and spent most of my days afraid. But you know what brought me joy and allowed me to escape into another world? Listening to the radio for 2 hours while the Yankees played. I totally immersed myself in that. I kept score, I drew pictures of my favorite players. Anything. For those two hours I had found a place of joy.

Even now when I don’t feel well my joy is that I don’t have that horrific post-Shingles pain that made me want to kill myself (if you ever wonder “how” someone in chronic pain could contemplate suicide, let me know and I’ll guide you through it). Sometimes I have to remind myself that it could be worse and those are the times I remember to go back to when it finally went away. That’s funny too. I was extremely sick at that time but it didn’t seem that bad because that nerve pain had gone.

There are places of joy. You just need to do the work to search for them.

Whether it’s physical or emotional pain, the joy you find will ease a bit once you start to put your focus on the joyful things.