Playing with our focus!!!
It’s evident that most people do various things to keep themselves occupied during the weekend or even when they find leisure time during the weekdays. Rather than saying occupied, we can say that they try to spend some good quality time during the weekend that is not related to work life.
So do I, where I love meeting people be it, old friends or new acquaintances. On one such weekend, I randomly bumped into a very old friend of mine in a mall. I was in fact surprised to see her in the neck of the woods. Of the top of my head, although we hardly had any conversation for the past few years, we still had the same old rapport and greeted each other with abusive words as we used to do before :p.
At times, with days, months and years passing, a few people tend to lose the connection and things fade out with the opposite person. They turn very formal when they encounter each other after a gap. But that wasn’t the case with me and my friend. We just gelled in a jiffy with each other.
Now that both of us had no further plans for the day, we decided to give the evening to each other. Our conversation was so random that it oscillated from personal life to professional life and a lot of other hilarious stuff. While she was narrating a few incidents that were toxic at the workplace, she even went to the extent of deciding to quit such a workplace. With a lot of politicking happening around, people talking a lot of negatives all the time, ending up with gossips etc, it naturally made her mind subconsciously assume that these are bigger toxic problems that she is dealing with in life.
Despite having a good set of people around her at the same workplace who have always turned out to be her well-wishers, she started giving importance to the negative happenings around her. However, one day she opened up this conversation to a good friend of hers and concluded that ‘It’s time for me to quit’.
Hearing everything, the young man requested her to do a small task before she proceeded further. He asked her to go to the pantry, take a coffee mug filled up to the brim with hot coffee and walk around the floor twice. Hearing this, she smirked and asked him ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you nuts? I’m this serious and you are asking me to do such a stupid thing’. However, he somehow convinced her to do it.
After doing exactly the same that she was asked to do, when she went back to inform him, below is what he replied to her,
While you had the hot coffee in your hand and walked around the floor, people still continued having random conversations. A few were positive and the rest all were negative and gossip.
Nevertheless, were you able to even hear what people were conversing about? And if not, why couldn’t you hear them now and experience the toxicity?
While she was thinking about the same, he said,
‘This time, your focus was completely on yourself and the coffee mug throughout your walk. A focus on not spilling the hot coffee, else you will hurt yourself. Even if a single drop of coffee falls, it will burn your skin.
So all that you need to do is to focus on yourself and you will automatically begin to ignore the negatives considering them not to be of much importance. It is high time you focus on yourself.
With this, he suggested to her to take some time and ponder on the same than playing it by ear.
It is certainly true that we can only have control over the things we do and not over what others do. My friend and I just wondered what if she had focused on the conversations happening around and was lethargic with the coffee mug. For sure, in a few seconds, the entire floor would have stared at her after hearing the loud scream (with the coffee being spilt on her hand)… LOL
That’s when we realised that, in life, there’s no one who has not faced any issue/trouble. But the way to deal with an issue completely depends on our perception and our choice of precedence. If we think a problem is very big, it will look giant and we would spend the majority of the time thinking about it. But if we take that lightly and do not overemphasise it, that’ll feel as though we don’t have to invest so much time thinking about it as it’s not worth getting so much of our attention.
Thereby, playing with our focus is completing in our hands.
That said, ‘When you focus on yourself, you grow, when you focus on shit, shit grows’.
