Every day you spend in fear, in anxiety, bound to some potential, negative future outcome is a wasted day. Whenever your options for living are limited, reduced, paired down and minimized, you are being stolen from and subsequently your life is being wasted. Each new day is a glorious opportunity to live and experience and pursue, but when distractions enter in, you begin to unknowingly squander away your days fixated on the wrong things; looking in the wrong direction, missing the life that was given you to enjoy. How many people find themselves living wasted days and wasted nights?

Life, undistracted and unencumbered, has within it a certain energy level; a vital life force; the capacity to do all that you ever want to do. In its most basic essence, life naturally contains the vitality and excitement necessary to sustain you and render you contented and satisfied. Yet, on the other side of that life, an opponent works behind the scenes to steal from you that which was yours to enjoy. And like the robber that creeps in undetected, you are unable to recognize the theft occurred until long after the valuables are gone. So many people today only half live. Sure they are going through the motions and dutifully carrying out the day’s responsibilities, but they are not really living. They spend their days consumed with negative potentialities and that nagging, annoying something back there claiming they cannot really live and experience because of something soon to appear to thwart their efforts. Instead of moving forward they sort of hover there, caught up and entangled in something too elusive to lay ahold of or recognize. They know something is wrong, but cannot quite put their finger on it. All they know for sure is that their life has been reduced, hemmed in, hindered in some vague way; some undetectable way. 

Whenever you are feeling bored; trapped in predictable routines; mired in responsibilities and rules for living, you are being stolen from. One by one the things you enjoy are questioned and subsequently curtailed to the point where your enjoyments all must be censored, contained and controlled. God forbid you start having too much fun. Enjoyments need to be only half enjoyed and all supposed excesses reigned in and brought under subjection. Soon you find that all your enjoyments have been scaled down to acceptable levels, leaving you, the one called into question, questioning all of your choices; limiting all of your fun; afraid to experience and live. You’ve become irresponsible in your responsibilities. You are super safe and at the same time, almost dead. You don’t go too far, but you also don’t go far enough. You have been tricked into thinking that all fun, all good times, all enjoyments should be questioned, while never considering the source of your constraints. You consider that maybe God favors the bland lifestyle and all apparent good should be reexamined. In this, you have been deceived. Life is to be enjoyed and routine, rote, unthinking behaviors excluded at all costs. 

Much of our wasted days and wasted nights are centered in an over preoccupation with self. What a dichotomy that pursuit of self leaves you with an unhappy self. The more you look inward; the more you evaluate and assess; the more you focus on your own emotions and your own feelings, the unhappier you become. You feel as if you are getting to the bottom of you, but you are not. You seek to discover yourself and instead discover everything but yourself. Self-focus distracts you from your life. You cannot see the moment you are in. You cannot experience others because your are experiencing your own self and every fleeting emotion associated with self. This is a deception of untold proportions. You falsely assume that if you can just get to the bottom of you, all will be well. However, there is no bottom of you of which to arrive. Instead there is nothing but imperfection more closely examined leading nowhere. But, once you turn away fully from almighty self, you quickly find joy and peace and the energy to live. You experience not you at the center of all things, but you experiencing all things of which you are not the center. 

Wasted days and wasted nights are the by-products of distraction. Whatever distracts takes away from that which is real, genuine, true. Distractions concerning worries and fears blind you to the true essence and blessings in your life and slowly, but surely, grind your life to a halt. Distractions concerning behaving properly or not sinning, not making God unhappy, not being good, not being worthy, rob your life of fun times and work to censure your enjoyments, limit your pleasures and generally suck the life out of all that contains life and vitality. Distractions over self, preoccupation with self, obsessions concerning self and only self, paint a picture of failure and defeat lived out in varying, fleeting emotions which are no more true than the moments they appear within. They distract from the experience of others and isolate you, trapped within a prison cell of your own making. All are nothing but distractions leading you away from the reality of your life over to some other place that doesn’t exist, or exists only in your own mind. 

You owe it to yourself to recognize where the distractions of life have crept in and robbed you of your blessed existence. Take note of those times you aren’t there, but only half there caught up in the web of your own thoughts. Move your mind and thoughts to another place. Stop standing around mesmerized by what appears to be going on and get busy experiencing what is actually going on. Engage yourself fully, single minded and unafraid. Get outside of yourself and turn your focus outward. Every night you spend worried; every day you spend caught up in self evaluation and judgment; every day you spend consumed with your own feelings is a waste of your time and life. Rid yourself of the distractions and get busy living the day you are in. Get busy living the one short life you have been given. Move ahead and do it now…

Just some good thoughts…