Intention

I'm still marinating on this one, and I think there are fallacies to this but living a life with intention (I think the other word I heard tossed around was mindfulness) makes a difference.

This applies to relationships, careers, and lifestyle in general. All those stupid stories about how people turned their lives around has a lot to do with perspective. They started paying more attention to what they ate or lived or whatever. They made intentional changes that (usually) worked out in their favor.

Everything we do takes us somewhere, whether we mean to or not. The actions we take have repercussions and it's taking into account the fact that what we do is a reflection of who we are and what we'll become that gives weight to this little thing called intention.

I mean I think that placing too much stress on it is probably problematic because people stress and then are paralyzed into not doing anything at all, but I think in realizing that things are always moving in a direction, if one chooses to allow oneself to absorb experiences or learn new things, one becomes a better person or at least a wiser one for what one has gained.

When I went to Korea, I had no intention of getting better at reading and writing Korean. However, when I worked for a company where email communications were in Korean, I had to get better and because I made the intentional effort to get better, I did. I could've just written terrible emails the whole time I was there if I didn't care but that intention to made me improve that much faster.

I think that what I'm getting at is that it's the minor changes and the small things we do that add up. I suppose in some ways, it becomes about one's frame of mind too. Can you turn a situation into one where you are thankful for what you have, rather than getting annoyed about what you missed? Instead of playing one more game for the One Piece app, I could be sleeping just that much earlier.

In some ways, it is perhaps the small things that end up defining who we are, rather than the big.

Perhaps this is going back to the importance of time.