Transform an ordinary day in your hometown into a special day

(written by May Rose)

»It’s just another manic Monday, I wish it was Sunday.« How many of you out there can relate to these lyrics and »thinking mode« on Mondays? I’d guess: Many of you. Not so long ago I was like that too. What has changed? Well, Mondays are still Mondays, but what has definitely changed is my perception of it.

In this article I will explain how easily you can turn an ordinary day in your hometown into a Special Moment to remember.

Here are 6 GUIDING POINTS:

  1. START THINKING LIKE A TOURIST

When we travel, we often have that thrilling liberating feeling that we are experiencing something special, something new. Why can’t we have this feeling when we get back home? Usually we think we already know everything and everyone in our hometown but is that really true? Far from it. What if we switch our »local resident« thinking into a »tourist’s expectations« thinking? Well that can change a lot. I tried it and it turned out to be an utmost fascinating, thrilling experience. Damn, it was good. 🙂 (I will describe my personal experience at the end of the article if you want to read more about the details and inspiration for this article 🙂 ). So HOW to change your perception of your hometown? Firstly, you can imagine yourself as a tourist who is visiting the city for the very first time. What kind of activities do you want to experience? What are your interests? See, all you need is a little introspection. If this way is not the right one for you and you want something more creative… You can imagine yourself as a girl/boy who fell in love with a girl/boy from a foreign country and you want to impress him/her with your knowledge and little special places in the city when he/she will come to visit you for the first time. Come on, everyone is trying to impress someone when we’re in love, admit it. 😉 Or you can imagine yourself as a tourist guide who is in charge of a group of wealthy tourists who want to give your company a big donation for development of your city and that is the one and only and last step to get your big promotion. These are just some examples and 2 possible scenarios which you could have in mind. Feel free to USE YOUR CREATIVITY and IMAGINATION and write your own scenario. You wouldn’t believe how far imagination can go. You may even surprise yourself. 😉

  1. BE SPONTANEOUS (and follow your »gut feeling«)

This world needs more spontaneity. You’re probably wondering how to follow your »gut feeling«, your inner intuition, right? Well allow yourself to delete one thing from your schedule which is not a necessity that day and allow yourself to walk or drive somewhere with no precise direction. Break your rules and routines. Delete that unnecessary plan in your head. You don’t even have to decide »I’ll go.« Just go. Everything else will come to you on the way. That’s what true spontaneity is. Believe in the path even if you don’t have a map (all you need is just “the next step on your feet”). 🙂 Use your courage to defeat this one thing you fear the most.

Like many wise writers say: »The thing you fear the most is the very thing that will set you free.« When you get that feeling of absolute Freedom on your way, you’ll know you’re being truly spontaneous.

  1. SPOIL YOURSELF WITH SOMETHING YOU LIKE

Take a deep breath and stop for a Moment, when you see something or someone that you will automatically feel a magnetic attraction too. It’s an opportunity to spoil yourself with something or special someone. Sit somewhere in the pub or a coffee shop with some unique ambient and your favorite music playing in the background. Order your favorite drink or continue experimenting and spontaneously order something completely new. Drink that, eat something that will make your taste buds go all crazy. For all the extroverts: Start singing out loud (nobody will remember it after 2 hours, don’t worry), take that girl or a boy you like to a dance between the tables, set yourself on fire. It’s so easy. BUT if this sounds too much for you and you’re more of an introvert type, just sit somewhere in the corner just like a Ranger in the Lord of the Rings and just observe. Take your pencil out. Start writing down your observations or start drawing what you see. You’ll be surprised how many things you’ll notice, because probably after a long time, you’ll take your time to put your attention out of your overthinking mind. 🙂

  1. BE SPONTANEOUS but MAKE an approximate TIME FRAME/ METHOD 1, 2, 3

You probably already heard about the saying: »Every star of the evening knows that she/he must leave the party at its climax.« 😉 Because later on the “specialness” of the moment slowly starts to fade away and later on you even criticize yourself for not taking enough time for your other responsibilities and plans. So I suggest you go with an Easy Method of counting 1, 2, 3. So 1 – First hour for enjoying the spontaneous ride somewhere,  2 – Second hour for a Special Moment for Yourself, and finally 3 –  Third hour for Leaving »the party« at its climax. 🙂

  1. ENJOY THE MOMENT IN TIME with MUSIC

Music is a unique way of expressing yourself, a way to experience catharsis and it represents a strong bond within your experience and memory later on. Music leaves its imprint in your long term memory. As I wrote before, go and sit somewhere where your favorite music shouts from background, listen to your favorite record while you’re driving or just use your headphones while sitting on the bus listening to Youtube’s suggested soundtracks (it’s kind of scary how accurate they are these days 😮 😀 ). Afford to experience a »screaming relief« and scream all the negativity out. Rock it! (If you feel the need to, of course. 😉 )

  1. GIVING and RECIEVING BALANCE/GRATEFULNESS

As you wander around, spoiling yourself with time exclusively for you, don’t forget that every receiving of positive energy requires the same amount of giving the positivity to something or someone else. If you see a blind man/woman, help guide him/her for a while. If you see a beggar, give him/her some spare change (it’s just one coffee or tea less for you). It doesn’t have to be someone though. You can give positivity back to the nature itself.

Feed those hungry birds, give those dry flowers some water, pick up that trash and put it in the trash can where they belong. There are many examples of what you can do. Do at least 2 or 3 good deeds and feel that good feeling of giving some of your attention to something/someone else. But after you do a good deed, don’t brag about it! That just devalues the initial intention. Have it for yourself. Show some sincere gratitude and those good deeds will come back to you as an Aboriginal boomerang. Trust me. It works. Gratitude makes wonders. 🙂

-> My personal story about an ordinary day which turned into a Special “Moment In Time” experience:

So inspiration for this article came from an ordinary February Monday. I woke up in the morning with a feeling of tension, stress about how I will finish all of my work from my schedule for the day, worried that I won’t make it because my energy was very low. I felt like a phone battery on the last 5%, you know – when you are still happy to have it but you are nervous just wondering how much time is left before your phone dies. Well it’s easy with a phone battery, a charger will do. All you need is electricity. And I started wondering … Bruce H. Lipton, PhD, explains that “minimum voltage potential for a human body is greater than 3.5 trillion volts”. Well ok, I thought to myself, that’s indeed an interesting fact but HOW can I recharge myself to FEEL that electricity flow in my body? Then I did a little introspection. I reminded myself of one of the things that truly relaxes me and fills my soul and body with joy – travelling or just driving somewhere, being in motion. Well I didn’t have enough time or money to go to the citybreak somewhere but suddenly an idea popped into my mind – “What if I just go for a drive with a city bus in my hometown and just enjoying the panoramic view while listening to my favorite record/songs?” I missed that “tourist vibe” when having a new experience. And so I went. I decided to take 3 hours for myself, for recharging, so later in the day the light bulb in my head could shine its brightest. I decided to follow my intuition, going somewhere without precise direction. I felt super happy, like a child who was about to open his Kinder Surprise – (chocolate egg). So I sat on the first bus that came to the bus station. And it turned out to be the bus with the most perfect direction. Its last station was underneath our closest hill, called Pohorje. (Thank you, intuition.) Connecting to nature was exactly what I needed in that moment. At first I just wanted to take a walk through the forest. During the walk I started to think – “I was enjoying the ride through the city, observing the nature and its habitants, the slow flow of our river Drava, warm sunbeams down the artistic old buildings which looked like an old lady who never lost her style and beauty, young couples holding hands while crossing our magnificent Maribor’s bridges, elegant flying birds above the modern structures of the town … Well I’m not a bird, but if I want to lift my energy, why not move myself physically – to a higher altitude? My mind will follow, right? I always enjoyed the view from a high place but I left many opportunities because of the fear of “going up”. I had nausea and vertigo because of a silly fear of falling down, many times before. But I overcame my fear a while ago. Hmm, one more reason why I should do this …” So I went and bought a ticket. The next thing I know I was in a cable car heading upwards to about 1000m altitude. The view was absolutely stunning. When I reached the top, I stopped by in a lovely bar in front of the hotel, ordered one of their “Winter Delights” drinks and enjoyed the warm feeling of being in the moment. I was so proud of myself, realizing I just managed to transform an ordinary low energetic, grey day into a special moment which felt like a true touristic experience. It didn’t take long to take out my notebook and pencil and write down all of these ideas from my experience for a new article. At the end I said “thank you” to my intuition, to nature, to the people and the universe itself for helping me raise my vibration and I felt I needed to “return the favor” somehow.
So on the way home I fed some hungry pigeons, poured some water on dry flowers on the bus station and I gave some spare change to a street musician. So the “Circle of Life” for that day was completed.

Well, I figured it out – battery charger needs electricity to work while we as humans need different charges to reset our electricity field. My charger was a musical/harmonical movement through the peacefulness of nature, haste of people, breathtaking architecture and well settled infrastructure. My battery went from 5% in the morning to 99% after just 3 hours (I blame the warm “Winter Delight”-punch for that one last percent missing, while writing down that reflection 😛 ).

(If you want more information about Maribor, Pohorje and cable car, check the following link: https://www.visitmaribor.si/en/information/around-maribor/by-cable-car/ )

So that’s all for this one (article) folks. 🙂 Hope you enjoyed reading it; leave a comment/a further suggestion and please share your personal experience in the comments down below, if you felt inspired in any way. ^^

~May Rose~

Success factor: consistency vs. routine

If you’re aiming to be successful in life, in whichever way you seem fit, and if you’re reading this blog in the first place, there’s a high chance you’ve already looked up something along the lines of “how to succeed in life”, right? Allow me to ask this: how often is “consistency” mentioned or highlighted?

From my personal experience it often snaps between the opposites – either “not mentioned nearly enough” and “…consistency matters most! (in the end)”. That in itself is confusing enough as it is. But let’s add a little bit about “routine” to that mix: in the likely chance that you follow about one spirituality-themed site or at least one celebrity or influencer, who’s remotely spiritually inclined (speak: “deep”), then it’s very likely you’ve come across the saying “Routine kills creative thought” or “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it’s lethal”. How much does that resonate with you?

As someone, who spent most of his life scheduled and/or organized as much and as tidy as possible and still spends a lot of time trying to make routine out of the most trivial tasks, BUT ultimately pursues growth and success in life, these two aspects/thoughts shook me quite deeply, each in its own way and direction, respectively. Hence where the inspiration for this post came from.

Let’s start with saying, that we can all agree that consistency is surely an important factor for success, correct? Be it changing/adjusting your sleep schedule; trying to gain/lose weight through a new, healthy, adjusted diet; getting your work done sooner/better/faster, etc. Making a habit of such steps is very likely to get you the results/success you desire. But how long before that consistency becomes routine? …suddenly has a noticeable “negative” ring to it, huh? That’s the reaction I had to that sentence, anyway. (Let me just re-adjust the balance by saying, that that has a lot to do with the stigmatisation of the word (Routine) in and of society itself, which is NOT the point of this article, but felt like it needed to be addressed). But it did make me think just where the line between being consistent and “surrendering to routine” lies. I would arguably say that consistency, as a term and action, involves growth; a certain action/activity; movement. More importantly I feel it involves a certain level of conscious awareness, mindfulness and focus directed at a specific task. Whereas routine incorporates something like an “auto-pilot” – where consciousness takes its hands off the wheel of mind and, prays be, lets the body take full control of itself.
This also ties in well with our human biology, specifically neurology – not to get into overly scientific terms, but our nervous system (speak “consciousness” and “memory” works very much like that – a part of it is designed to quickly gather new information and “learn” (is active, focused), while another big part is best suited to execute and almost passively, with little to no awareness, process or recreate the stored (learned) information (for example, make a specific movement of a limb).
An example in practice of this would be, if you sleep over your alarm, then take any necessary action to get to work as fast as possible and arriving with that feeling of “I don’t even know how I made it so fast.” That is where routine still comes in very handy. Deeply stored information – (frequent) habits – need considerably less energy to execute, compared to having to acknowledge, be aware and consciously make an action, for example.

But back to the connection to success – the world, as it is nowadays, strives towards “consistent growth and progress”; “quantity over quality”, as it seems. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It is surely reaffirming from a growth and (business) advancement perspective. But as we know “too much of a good thing can easily turn bad“. Gathering from my observations we are beginning to direct more and more towards a “quality over quantity” mindset (or at least we ought to). This is beginning to have a much more positive effect both for us as individuals (with our individual health, spiritual-emotional wellbeing and even purpose) as well as society (consisting of individuals) and the world as a whole.

Therefore my takeaway would be: do the things you love doing and enjoy the most (as long as it’s not hurting or hindering you or anyone else, of course), even if it’s only one or two things, but do it as wholeheartedly, aware and focused as possible. Quite literally everyone can benefit from it!

Some more thoughts “to debate”: Just how different are “consistency” and “routine” to you? Are they actually similar? Or even the same thing with different terms? Should we perhaps “routinise consistency” or “consistently make use of routine”? Wordplays aside, what is your take on these topics? Do you prefer one expression over the other or do they ring similarly to you? Do you have any stories of consistency or routine from your life? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

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