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THERE is something about the month of May that I love. It’s exciting in many ways in the sense that it’s really all about renewal and rebirth.
It’s so consistent — the trees have new leaves, the birds are nesting, baby lambs are born, the sound of the cuckoo can be heard and the long hot lazy days of summer are about to arrive.
Perhaps my love of May runs a little deeper, as it was my mother’s favourite month as well and she always welcomed it with her own rendition of that beautiful song ‘Queen of the May’, made famous in its time by Canon Sydney MacEwan.
Speaking of my mother, one of her catchphrases was ‘don’t be wasting my battery’.
Like all good things, if I’m to be honest, I didn’t fully appreciate the value of it at the time but now I realise that even though it was a ‘throwaway’ comment there really is a lot of wisdom in it.
The point here really is that just like a battery, we human beings have a limited amount of energy.
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If we aren’t aware of that fact we won’t appreciate it, and thus we can waste a lot of that energy needlessly (we’re wasting our batteries!).
How, you might ask. Well consider this.
The average human being has about 60,000 thoughts in a day, of which 98 % are exactly the same as the day before (repetitive) and up to 80% of these thoughts are negative.
This is not ‘me’ coming up with these statistics, all you have to do is ‘Google it’ and you will discover it for yourself.
Even if these ‘facts’ are half true I’m sure you will agree that there is still an awful lot of ‘wasting’ of our very valuable energy happening on a daily basis.
If you were playing on a football team, any coach worth his salt would reprimand you or any of your team mates if he saw a lot of energy being needlessly wasted.
Very often in the highly competitive world of sport it is the team with the most energy at the end that wins the match.
In life, for the most part, we have to be our own coaches and I believe a good place to start to be aware of our limited amount of energy and to cherish it .i.e. (Stop wasting our batteries!).
A good question here is ‘How do we prevent all this wasting of energy’.
The answer is very simple – Learn the art of stopping all of these repetitive thoughts which will dramatically reduce this 98% figure mentioned above.
If you are not wasting your energy needlessly then you are saving it so instead of ‘Wasting your battery’ you are ‘Charging your battery’.
Think of it like a mobile phone, a mobile phone without any charge is useless.
This ‘art’ of controlling our thought process is also known as meditation or mindfulness. I also believe it was the most powerful advice given to us by Jesus Christ when He said ‘I Am (is) the way’.
He was telling us to live in the present and not to be worrying about the past or the future. In other words, not to be wasting our batteries!
• Next week I am going to write about — The Fool might be Right
Roger love all your articles, and your mom saying about wasting her battery, so so true , and like you , I find my self reminiscing about things my mother said , but was too young or whatever to understand , she used say ” If you don’t have inner peace , nothing is of any value . That generation were so so wise , and it wasn’t in college they learned it . I so admire them God Rest Them ! Thank you
It is positive to put some material ‘out there’ for humans to ponder…..