Time Stealers & Bad Habits

The following video contains the blog written below for those who prefer it in Video Blog Format. :)

It was TomS on thepublicrecord.com who sparked this. He had watched my Video Blog; ‘Something Has to Give’ and commented below. I want to share what he wrote;

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“I had dinner at the Princeton University restaurant that Einstein would frequent. I sat next to his table which was preserved as he would have it. Even a genius has his habits. LOL.

It is the hardest thing to do -- break a cycle of behavior. I think about that a lot with my son. What habit am I putting into him that I really don't want him to have? What habit can I break that I keep repeating? (not talking about the little habits... I mean the big ones that change your life every four years or so ... as if we were still in school and needing to graduate from something). It takes a bird’s eye view to see those and how rare is it for an ordinary man to see that without the help of someone who knows better?

I really like Maya Angelou.... "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it." —Now that I know better, I do better." — Maya Angelou ... Love that woman!”

(*Addendum; not the word believe)

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If you happen to catch my building Manager in between her soap operas, you’ll see her doing the exact same thing she did yesterday. She will be watering the front gardens, vacuuming the halls or taking her small cart and walking it to the grocery store. Her daily rituals worked for me because I knew exactly when I could let the stray cat in or out.

If the power is out when she needs to watch her soaps, it’s a tragedy. I have a full understanding of what soap operas can do to a person. My Grandmother lived with us on the farm and watched the whole afternoon line-up. Starting at 1 pm she’s watch Days of Our Lives, All My Children, Another World and the Young & the Restless. I think General Hospital might have even been on another channel that she’d flip back and forth to.

Now if watching soap operas for one third of your waking hours is something you truly love and you are totally ok with it, that’s cool. But I suspect this sort of daily marathon is to combat boredom or loneliness. After all, the story line behind a Soap is designed to induce gossip and intimacy. Every cliff-hanging moment keeps you on the edge and wanting more the next day. I think living through others can either spice up our own life or keep our mind off of something really bad.

This habit my Grandmother had seeped into our lives too. Would Ashley and Victor ever get together or would Nikki have a stranglehold on him for life? Would Katherine and Jill finally kill each other?

I just had to know! Every single day, I had to know!

What started happening, is life got in the way of TV. Summertime would get you hooked and then dang it if school didn’t interfere! I was faced with my choice; my education or the life of Jill Abbott!

Ok so very dramatic, but you get what I am saying. Soaps can be an anchor around your feet. For me, they were a bad habit that my Grandmother ingrained in us.

There were other bad habits growing up like smoking, alcohol and drugs. Those tend to be the habits we think about. There are support programs for those, but there wasn’t a support program for the following bad habit that I developed and I am not sure there is one. I had to ditch it myself.

The bad habit is “negativity”. Most people engage in it in some fashion. It’s either gossip, hate, racism, political wars, religious discussions. The bad habit of negativity seeps into every corner like poison through a building’s ventilation system. We don’t understand what is making us sick and it might not even be enough to kill us. But I am seeing spots of this sickness everywhere. Pessimism is also a bad habit.

When I say that these things are habits, it’s different than those who are actually negative or pessimistic with just cause. Doesn’t that even seem ridiculous?

I call them habits because we have developed a lingo in society where we go for the bad reaction based on it coming out of our mouth that way. We give our own leaders negative titles because everyone else does. We will spew out sentences that didn’t come from our own thoughts, but because the news, magazines and radio keep saying it over and over and over. It’s like we have become programmed to say them. Yesterday at 6 pm, you maybe watched the news and they blurted out something to make you say you hate someone or something. What we don’t see is that our daily habit or ritual of watching the news told us exactly what to feel at that time of day. You may even leave the broadcast, jump on Google and find more related stories to keep THEIR ritual going.

The reason I stopped watching soaps and the news is because I didn’t want my life or their opinions dictating how I think, how I feel or how I live. Their news is not the only news. WE make our own news. WE create our own story. We say where we will be at 6 pm. NOT them.

Breaking a bad habit or ritual takes a massive amount of courage. I believe it’s the biggest enemy on our person. We can break this if we can actually identify it. Nobody can make you join their religion, their group, their political party or Monday Night basket-weaving session. WE get to say how we spend our time.

What I did was took a look at my day and had to really identify what discussions were stealing my soul. I had to do some Math and see where my time was wasted. I decided I wouldn’t be guilted into joining anything that did not enrich my life and those around me.

I put my TV by the curb and I changed my home page from the news channel it was always landing on. Time spent playing an instrument or painting my dolls beats the hell out of the negative broadcast.

If you get joy from that, you are the only person I know who delights in it.

Snapping the face off of my cello,

Karen :)

“Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go.” ~Henry Austin Dobson