Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
A new week starts, undoubtedly full of both opportunities and duties to fulfill.
I have always been a firm believer that we are what we do. But, in a world that is addicted to doing, we always face the danger of focusing on the ‘what’, and forgetting about the ‘why’.
Though our weeks are conventionally split into five days for productivity and two for rest (or laundry), is the weekend enough to gather one’s thoughts and provide direction for another five days (if that is how long your ‘productive’ week consists of)? Or should self-reflection on how one spends their time be a daily act, a duty towards maintaining a sense of self?
Days pass quickly, if you let them. And then our habits slowly become ourselves:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung
Unless you are Salvador Dalí, of course, who claimed to know exactly who he was, and started each day to remind himself of it:
“Every morning upon awakening,” he wrote in 1953, “I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”
It only takes one look at his self-portrait to realise how tongue-in-cheek the above statement is, how the concept of ‘self’ is so elusive that unless one works on it daily, its weight will not be supported for long by the fragile sticks that hold it together.