As you can probably tell, I spend a lot of time thinking about things. (Here, it’s specifically relationship and personal internal working stuff, but I assure you there is much much more going on in my head.)
Thought is important. Without thought, we are prone to doing very stupid things. Sure, some people can live impulse to impulse, but that is an erratic and dangerous lifestyle unless one is preternaturally lucky.
Thought without action, though, is worthless. If things just stay locked up in your own head–be they thoughts of relationships or ideas of how you can improve yourself–they will forever be ethereal, eternally imaginary.
They will have no practical purpose in the world.
Over time, those impotent proto-actions will isolate you from the world and cause you harm as surely as continually acting on a broken thought process will.
Last week, I ran through a semi-coherent list of thoughts inspired by that weekend. Many of them dealt with acting on faulty decisions.
We can so easily repeat our patterns again and again and again, continually getting the same or similar results, that unless we take the time to think–to hold back from acting on something that is habit–we will perpetuate our own negative spirals of thought with guarantied failed “attempts” at making things better.
This is also true of those patterns that seem to bring us prosperity.
We can become so comfortable in our successful patterns of thought and action that we don’t realize when they begin to degrade. Before long, the surrounding environment changes enough that even the most tried and true pattern for success will yield, at first, diminishing returns and then, eventually, a surprising cascade of extra-painful failure.
Over the past week, while things have been very quite here at WithoutBeingCrushed.com, I’ve been thinking heavily on these things.
I have spoken with a number of friends who are going or have gone through very tough times. Who have had their self-image shattered or skewed, their comfortable lives thrown into a disruptive, chaotic spin, or suddenly stumbled upon the most amazingly good things.
All of that negativity and triumph comes down to thought and action.
Sometimes the successful resolution of a bad situation comes from changing how you think about someone else’s actions.
Sometimes it’s about the actions you take yourself.
Everything is a mixed bag in this life. Every bit of joy has within it at least a slight shadow of pain. Every tragedy, an opportunity for greatness.
Take the time to think, but never be afraid to act.
And no matter what, realize that there are consequences that will have to be dealt with. Those spawn a whole other series of thoughts and actions.
[Still a wee bit off schedule here… new posts may be a bit more erratic and amorphous than I’d planned. But life in the real world has gotten interesting and is giving me a ton of fodder for future writing that needs to be sorted through… and acted on. 😉 ]
