Jennifer Louden is known as “The Comfort Queen” and featured on many globally recognised TV shows, including Oprah, with over 800,000 copies of her first book sold internationally. She is the world's leading authority on carving out the time and desire to look after your own well being and hence achieve more with less stress despite having a very busy life.
Q: What do a blue screen, bits of yam, blindness, and poop have to do with one another?
A: Read on to discover.
I've been practicing Eckhart Tolle's advice this week. Whenever I am resisting a moment- from a subtle resistance like "I wish that person would drive faster" to "I wish my body worked better in this yoga pose" to the more vehement "I wish my Dad were here NOW," I've repeated to myself, "Act as if I choose this." As if are very important words in this sentence- this is not the idea that X is happening because I create my own reality and thus actually cause events to happen; rather that X is happening and I can push it away and thus exhaust and delude myself or I can embrace whatever is happening as if I had carefully orchestrated it and actually wanted it.
This experiment was making my sorrow tender and rich and I was digging it. It allowed me to take the very sudden and completely unannounced appearance of a blue screen -- and nothing but a blue screen-- on my computer in stride, as it did the subsequent trip to the Apple store (with its attendant long weight and crowded mall setting). I embraced the 300$ repair estimate and the loss of my most cherished tool for up to two weeks with little more than a gulp.
The clogged toilets upstairs and downstairs and strangely in many public restrooms I've visited: no problem. Not knowing what my appointments are because my calendar is on the computer thus trying to reconstruct my life from memory (and what memory would that be?), still no worries. Embrace, choose, accept.
The flow started to back up when I borrowed a desktop computer from my left brain this morning (also known as Deb my amazing assistant), and when I attempted to plug in my husband's monitor, I couldn't find any place to plug it in. No video in -- how strange! After phone calls to various computer whizzes and a trip to Radio Shack and then two trips to the computer tech store - this took all morning and into the early afternoon - I discovered I had not seen the video connection - it is sort of hidden under a little shelf on the back of the computer. It was there all along. I wasted so many hours... Okay, okay, embrace. Still choosing.
It was the garbage disposal exploding yam skin all over the kitchen and then my mom calling to say we must boil all our water because of possible e coli contamination to our water supply that made me start to question the street creed of ole Tolle.
You know why? When the garbage disposal exploded, the only person I wanted to call was my Dad.