Terrie’s Tip – Remember that you are like a train. Your mind is the engineer controlling the whole process and your body is the boxcars carrying the valuable cargo (as valuable as you make it, that is)

Yesterday I trudged on trying to build my endurance for the July race – a seemingly impossible process. But it was a different experience. Previously my legs had been really hard to move – “dead legs” as they say. But thanks to great advice by Marie Boyd, my legs actually felt pretty good. It was the rest of me that didn’t seem to have any energy. It felt like drudgery to keep moving. Of course, this is creating consternation about whether or not I should even bother going to the race.

I realized that there is this disconnect which I think we experience so often in life. Our minds are the control car, the engineer, the lead car, whatever you call it. And behind it are the cars that carry everything around with us. All that cargo may be valuable or may be junk. How often do we stop and try to reassess it.

Are the cars filled with valuable and precious organs which we have taken such good care of, or have we neglected those organs and just exposed them to stress and other factors that decrease their value?

Are there hobos (people’s influences) on the cars, taking up space, talking to us and giving us messages that probably aren’t very accurate but they are their opinions and we’ve just carried them along with us?

Is there graffiti – mean things that we have experienced that we have absorbed as part of us?

What are we carrying around with us? Do the wheels and rails need greasing? Are the parts rusted? Are they telling us “no way, i don’t want to go that way, it’s too hard.”? or perhaps “Let’s just sit here and maybe someone will push us along so we don’t have to work much.”

Our mind is that control car. It has all the necessary switches and buttons. It can simply engage the cars and they will be locked in sync and move as a unit. So why doesn’t this happen all the time? Because we let the engineer in our mind go on vacation too often and there’s no one to really run the train. If the engineer is new or inexperienced it can be misled or not know how to throw the switches. or even know which switches do what. This can happen especially if the train gets upgraded with technology but the engineer doesn’t keep up.

What is the engineer in your mind doing to help you move your train, to keep it clean and shiny, to keep the cargo safe and sound? it all starts with that engineer and all we need to do is evaluate how things are going and then change our thoughts and then our actions. Start with analyzing what you’re pulling along in the cargo cars and then what you think needs to be changed. Let your mind (your thoughts) get engaged and change what’s necessary to change. Change is good and will help your keep your train (your body) running smoothly. Discard the old baggage and clean off the graffiti. You should not be controlled by them. And you don’t have to be as long as you make your engineer in charge.