Your Wooden Spoon!

You’re in the kitchen preparing your favorite pasta meal. You pour your penne noodles in the boiling water. It should only take about 9 minutes since you prefer them al dente. You overhear something from the TV in your living room about some ongoing riots, and leave the kitchen, all attention on the looting and violence. When you finally remember your pasta, you run back to the kitchen, but it’s too late, all the boiling water has spilled onto the stove, and the pasta is so overcooked, it might as well be pudding.

This is what happens in life. We get distracted easily, our focus changing toward the loudest and most recent life event. The danger of that, however, is that when we lose focus, we can end up with a mess on our hands. And like the overcooked pasta, we may have a situation that is now worse because we got distracted.

If something does come up to which you have to divert your focus, don’t abandon what you were doing, but if you need to, take the necessary precautions. With the pasta, you can put a wooden spoon on top of it to keep the water from boiling over. In whatever situation you’re in, you need to figure out what that “wooden spoon” is, and do it.

Most of all, focus on what needs your attention. Don’t allow random distractions to take up so much of your energy.

Whatever you focus on is what will expand.

What in your life do you want to expand?