Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Retire Happy - Part III

In Part I we covered making a dream list, while in Part II we looked at how your spending your leisure time. Today we are going to take a lesson from young kids. Yes that's right, kids. Why? Watch a young kid at a park or anywhere for that matter and you will notice they seem happy most of the time. So how do they do it? Simple the just live in the now.

They don't worry about what's happening tomorrow, next week or even the next 10 minutes. They simply just enjoy what they are doing right now. So how can do the same thing? Concentrate on your what your doing during your leisure time and shut out those thoughts about everything else such as: "What should I make for dinner tonight? Did I pay that bill? I should look at the tire on the car. Did I forward that email to my boss about that project I'm working on?"

I know this sounds a bit strange, but it really does work. Think back about the last time you were really enjoying something. Chances are you were thinking about much of anything else at the time. You might also notice that when you are really enjoying an activity how quickly the time passes, which is also a good indicator that you were concentrating.

So how do you improve your concentration? That is a entire book on itself, so I'm not going to get into too many details here. I'll describe a method that works well for me. When I'm doing something that I want to concentrate and I get a stray thought. I merely note that it happened and then gently push the thought to the side. Keep doing that for every stray thought and after a while you will notice the number of stray thoughts will keep dropping when you doing things. This does take a while, but it is worth it in the end.

PS: You might have noticed the site is a little bit messed up at the moment. I'm trying some modifications to my template which has had a few unexpected changes which I'm trying to resolve this week. Don't worry I have a back up of the original template so is I can't get this one working right I will switch back by next week. - CD

4 comments:

Canadian Money said...

Happiness...always an interesting topic.

Your comments got me thinking a little. I added a few comments to my blog.

Canadian Money (recently retired)

Anonymous said...

I don't want to seem like a jack here, but this post had a large amount of grammatical errors that took away from the message you were trying to convey.

Might want to give your post a read through before publishing.

Tim Stobbs said...

J,

No your not a jack (or did you mean jerk?). Some of my posts are not that carefully edited prior to going online. Trust me I've read them later in the day and been ashamed at the quality of the post. This would be one of them.

Today I was working on the HTML code for the site which took a lot longer than I would like this morning and as such I did not give the post a careful edit.

Sorry for the poor post, I'll try to take more time in the future.

CD

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed your ideas. Kinda made me think: what if we all did way more of that? How would it affect our spending? -ie., if we regularly really absorbed, drank in the moment. Would we feel less compulsion to spend?