Focus

Something said to me yesterday made me start thinking about "focus". I may not be able to express this as well as I want to, but am going to try because I want this to be here to remind me when I forget and am focusing on the wrong things again. This photo was taken at the Wild Horse Saloon in Nashville earlier last year and, no, I was not drunk, lol! I just couldn't seem to get my camera to take a good picture of the ceiling with all the horses "running" around on it. Actually they aren't even moving, so I think it must have been all the lights messing it up and not a bad photographer:) Still I kept the photo, because I ended up liking the way it looked even though it was all blurry, you know, out-of-focus.

A few years ago those crazy pictures were so popular with the hidden images that you could only see if you looked at it a certain way. I have to confess I was never able to see the hidden pictures. Not sure what that says about me. Hopefully not that I can only see the obvious. The point to bringing that up is what you see is often in how you look at something, how you focus.

I first began thinking about this word as it relates to my interactions with others. If there are characteristics or habits that really bother me and I go into every interaction with that person with that negativity as my focus or expectation, perhaps that is all I'll be able to see. Maybe I'll miss some hurt they are trying to hide, my opportunity to encourage, or even something positive about them. What if I expected or looked for something good? Like after you buy a blue car and then you notice blue cars like yours everywhere. You see what you are looking for. I know people won't always act like I want them to, but even in just letting go of carrying that negativity in my heart, I feel it will be like lessening a burden.

Thinking or focusing on what I want in life is another aspect of this word that I've been pondering. I know all this is not groundbreaking science, but I want to record this for me. I have done this before when I was a teenager to lose weight. I had a mental picture of walking up stairs toward an image of myself at the weight I wanted to be. I did reach that goal. But life goes on and you get busy just trying to get by and make it. You become many things-employee, wife, mother, in addition to what you were before. In the process of living, it seems I've lost much of the ability to focus. I'm very scattered, all over the place in my interests, which is not bad in itself, but then I feel like I don't accomplish what I could because of it. This will be a goal for this new year for me. I started a Visualization altered book last year which I've not finished yet(of course) so I think I will work on that as a start and/or work on this in my journals.

You need to have the ability to shift your focus though. From what I've seen of friends and family who struggle with certain mental issues, they seem to be only self-focused, unable to see outside of their own world and often self-created or imagined problems. They stay trapped in this gray, sad place when all along there is a beautiful world all around them. Their focus is what they see.

I also want to be careful that I don't focus on the faults of others so that I don't have to examine my own. This one word for some reason has made me stop and think a lot. I'll close this post for now, but may come back to write more.