First I started with a mental gratitude list that was pretty easy with all the wonderful things I have going on in my life. I got tired of that after a while and began paying attention to the cars passing, saying a silent thank you for giving me space on the road and wishing them a day filled with joy and happiness. Next I started blessing people as they drove by (remember this is Maine and at 6am there are not a lot of cars on the road!) and gave an extra special thank you to the school bus drivers for keeping all those childern safe.
Later, I found myself on smaller and quieter roads and decided I wanted to focus my attention on all the flowers along my way. There are so many beautiful and different flowers with a variety of colors and shapes. Some are wild flowers growing freely in the fields while others are flowering bushes, like the rhodedendron, or flowers planted with care in a garden. After riding for many miles with my focus on the flowers I noticed that I wasn't seeing the signs, I wasn't paying any attention to the cars or even the houses I was passing, I was only seeing the flowers.
This made me pause and reflect on really how I create my life based on what I focus on, after all my mantra has been "what we think about grows". And seeing nothing but flowers as the miles click by made me realize just how true that statement is. OK, so now I had created a game and decided to focus on the bright colors that popped out at me like the teal blue children’s slide or the royal blue pool, there were the fluorescent green caution signs and the bright red stop signs. Wasn't it interesting how now that I was focused on these bright colors I stopped seeing the flowers, although the flowers were bright colors they didn't pop out like these more unnatural colors did. Later I changed my focus to looking for blue, anything blue and was amazed at how many different blue things I saw. What really surprised me more was looking down at my bike and not seeing the teal green at the top of the stem as I usually do but going right past it to the blue of my lock that is wrapped around the stem. Then today I was looking for red and saw everything that was red - a private property sign off in the woods, the red in a flag through the woods, a red tail light reflecting off the sun and the red on a tractor in a field - the red just jumped out at me where ever I was.
Never before had the concept of 'what you focus on grows' been more clear for me than it has been over the last few weeks of training. Time on my bike has become a time for the mind games and I am amazed at all that I am learning about how I focus my attention.
Give it a try, focus on something as you go through your day (or an hour or two) and see if it doesn't become more obvious to you. You know as I was focused on the blues and most of the reds I hardly noticed the flowers anymore and I didn't really see any of the signs or well all kinds of things that were going on and I totally missed seeing because my focus was on the color. So what am I missing because my focus is on 'red' instead of 'blue' or on the 'flowers' instead of the 'birds', and what if in life I am focused on 'lack' instead of 'abundance' or 'negative' instead of 'positive'?
So I thought I was just going out on a training ride but now that I am putting this on paper (so to speak) I am realizing how powerful it is. I am going to pay more attention to where my focus is and keep it turned up to all the positive and wonderful gifts this world has to offer, what are you thinking about?