Get on top of things

When your life is spinning out of control and a lot of things are going sideways, the more focus you pay to what you want the better, and what you want is order. You’re only helpless to life’s misfortune for as long as you fail to calm your mind down. Paying too much attention to the noise of chaos puts you under the control of its sway. Directing your thoughts to more productive ends gives you a chance to change your circumstances and it puts you on top of things.

Take it as if you’re resolving a traffic jam. From the viewpoint of one of the motorists, you can only see cars in front of you, blocking your way; the obstacles. You have no sense of how extensive the disruption is and no idea how it can be solved and when. However, if you elevate your thinking and focus on the bigger picture, then you will be in a position to solve the problem. Maintaining the view from above, you will have a bird’s-eye view of the traffic jam. Only then can you tell what is causing the problem and what needs to be dealt with first to get things moving again.

The moment you resolve to put an end to the chaos in your life is a moment to celebrate in itself; there are many sad cases of people who dislike their negative circumstances but never get to the point of wanting change, and even worst cases in which people fail to acknowledge that their lives are a mess in the first place.

Getting on top of the situation requires a combination of knowledge and action: you have to know the factors that make order possible in life (the enablers) and then do things to make use of those enablers.