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Choosing to Notice
Posted: June 10, 2011, 12:30 p.m., EDT
Over the weekend, I attended a lovely event outside in the open air. We were thankful that we had beautiful weather, even for a Wisconsin early summer, as it was mild with a nice breeze and abundant sunshine.
As I sat and listened to the music and heartfelt speeches of the event, I noticed the sound of the birds in the trees, happy that the world was green again. I watched the tree branches sway and marveled at how the sunshine bounced off their leaves. The grass, no longer covered in snow, was fresh and new again. I looked around me in amazement at the beauty I noticed all around me.
What I did not choose to notice, however, was the sound of the cars and trucks whizzing by on the street just over the grassy hill. I also didn’t notice the businesses located just beyond the trees, their large street signs visible over the boughs. The sounds of the kids playing behind us at the playground may have truly been louder than the tweet of the robins and sparrows, but my ears landed on the birds’ sweet songs in flight. You see, I chose to focus on what I felt was good, beautiful, desired, and hand-selected. I focused on the natural world with its positive energy, rather than the cement and metal world humanity has created on top of it.
We all have a choice where to focus our attention, what we choose to notice, why we decide to filter some things out of our perception, visual field, or other senses. We make a choice every minute of every day to either focus on the positive, such as the patient that ate a bite of food or the colleague who said “thank you.” Or to focus on the negative, such as the client who left disgruntled or the boss who didn’t notice your effort. Often times, there isn’t much difference between a “good day” and a “bad day,” except what we decided to pay attention to as the time was passing.
That’s not to say we should all just view the world through rose-colored glasses. There are bad things out there that happen to us and around us. And we should not ignore those events or the emotions they cause us to feel. However, we rarely use the power we have over our perception to get past the negative and spend the majority of our time basking in the positive. That’s particularly true when we leave work and what we carry home with us. What load is the heaviest, the dozen of smiling clients we saw that day, or the one mean and nasty client that “sucked the life out of us”?
Seems just by pure numbers alone, the dozen would outweigh the one, but we know that often isn’t the case. We go home at night carrying that nasty client home right along with us. Guess what? You don’t have to take them home with you…they should go back to their own world where they can make others miserable while you choose to have fun with your time off!
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Choosing to Notice
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