Personal Growth Success in Life
Experience Your Surroundings As If You Are A Tourist Seeing Them For The First Time
Since I started my experiment I’ve realized that I’m paying much closer attention to my thoughts, my actions, and also my surroundings, and I have to tell you it has modified the way I look at things in a big way.
I’ve been fortunate to do quite a bit of traveling in the past few months and have seen some incredibly beautiful and interesting places. Whether it was the beauty of the amazing people I met while in the Dominican Republic, the majestic mountains of Colorado, the awesome coastline and cliffs of Laguna Beach, or the history and beautiful monuments I visited while in Washington DC.
No matter how diverse and incredible those places were, while focusing on my experiment and developing the new habits through my action focused goal setting, I found that none of those places were any more amazing and beautiful as the place I call home … Grand Rapids, Michigan!
I understand that each of these places have a different type of beauty, but I am sure you are just like me. When you visit a place for the first time you take the time to focus on all the amazing sites and drink in the beauty. Once you’ve been there a second time, you may not notice all the details as much and you may even begin to take it for granted.
Now I’m not saying that you don’t still enjoy it, or find it as beautiful as you did the first time you visited it. I just think after awhile we tend to take things for granted because we don’t take the time to notice all the little things that we noticed the first time. The colors, the smells, the sounds, and the feeling you get as you sit quietly and just drink in all the scenery.
I believe that we tend to get so caught up in our daily lives that we drift through our days on autopilot and don’t take the time to notice the incredible beauty of our surroundings. I have begun to carry my phone with me on my walks and took the time to snap a few pictures along to way. It’s funny how when I return home and download the pictures to my computer how amazing the scenery is from afar.
I’ve been making an attempt to take a view of the world around me as if I were a tourist experiencing it for the first time. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been there 10 times or 1,000 times. I try to drink in the colors, the sounds, the smells, and the feelings I experience while drinking it all in.
Don’t get me wrong … it takes a bit of focus to stay focused … but it’s so worth the effort. 🙂
Think about how happy you’ve felt when you’ve visited an amazing place for the first time, and imagine how great it would be to relive that experience each and every time you return.
You could find that peaceful place in your mind every single day if it was close enough to your home and if you allowed yourself to slow down and soak it all in.
Give it a try. Spend 30 minutes or an hour each day for the next week and visit somewhere within a few minutes of your home that you’ve found yourself thoroughly enjoying in the past, and just relax and take it all in.
The best thing you can do is to allow yourself to metally return to that peaceful place you once found. I believe that training ourselves to do this, and finding that nice peaceful place near our homes, is an excellent way to add more enjoyment and relaxation to our lives. Do you have a place near where you live that you experience this serenity? Is it your backyard? A local park? A nice peaceful lake? Let me konw. Expecially if it is in Michigan. I’d love to check it out. Here are a few more pictures from along the walkway at Riverside Park where I walk each evening. Enjoy! 🙂
