Notice. Wait. Take Action.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an Experimental podcast by Rubo, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? You cannot change what you don't notice. However, just because you noticed something doesn't mean that you should immediately leap to action. This is something I've been thinking a lot about this morning and um, I was thinking a little bit about meditation as well.

[00:00:39] It's a bit of a tangent, but I promise I have a point. When you first learn to meditate, you are told to, you know, focus on your breathing, empty your mind. Don't get carried away in the thoughts in your mind , just focus on your breath, observe the thoughts, [00:01:00] and when you do that, you realize just how incessant that monologue is in your brain.

[00:01:06] You know, it just keeps going. And in the beginning, it is almost impossible not to get carried away in that current of thought. You know, from one thing to another thing to another thing. And then you might have a sudden moment of, oh wait, I'm not supposed to be doing that. And then you come back to your breath.

[00:01:26] and even in like a five minute session, you'll probably do it like 10 times – more probably. And it can be a frustrating thing that you cannot keep your focus on your breath for merely five minutes and you instantly want to do something about it. You wanna change something, you know? And in our lives we often do that too.

[00:01:52] first. Sometimes we're just not aware of things, but as soon as we are aware of them, our first [00:02:00] instinct in many cases is to leap to action, but I actually don't think that's a good idea. When you notice things, when you finally do notice something that is going wrong or could be better, you need to understand it a little bit more and you won't understand it

[00:02:20] enough to make a permanent change around it by just acting on this first moment of awareness. That's been my experience. You have to observe and sort of watch what happens again and again. You know, maybe write it down. Just notice this time, this is what triggered it. This time when something went wrong, that same thing?

[00:02:46] This was what triggered. Build a better picture. Without that picture, the immediate action that you might have lept to may have only treated a symptom of the problem, but not the [00:03:00] problem itself. And it takes time for a problem to reveal itself because it is not the first thing we see. A lot of the things that we see are often gonna be symptoms first.

[00:03:13] And the whole problem emerges after a period of observation, a period of awareness, because one symptom might lead you to another one that might lead you to another one, and eventually you'll form this conclusion. Based on that conclusion, the action that you take, the plan that you make, is far more likely to stick and

[00:03:37] cascade down that list of symptoms in a positive manner, in a way that might be more permanent, that might actually solve your issue. But you won't know what that is until you give it the space to happen in your awareness, right? Problems happen, things go wrong all the time, [00:04:00] and we don't always notice them at first.

[00:04:03] Which means we have to give them time once we do notice, so that we can understand them better. There are times when haste is good, but in most cases haste is – while counterintuitive, also counterproductive – we have to test things. We have to figure out what is actually going on, because usually the thing you think is going on is not the thing that's going on.

[00:04:37] Anyway, it's an unfinished thought, but that's kind of what I've been thinking about today.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.