A LIFE THAT POPs

Have you ever driven home without paying attention? You are following the rules of the road and being careful,but your concentration is on the day’s events or your conversation or the songs on the radio. You suddenly find yourself in your driveway and you do not remember how you got there. It is as if an automatic pilot allowed you to move along without really thinking. Many find a certain comfort in this but I am here to say you should fire that pilot! The same mechanism that got you home safely may also be the root of many of your fears,worries and unhappiness in life. It is called inertia and the first requirement of a fulfilling life is to Stop Living by Inertia.

Inertia and the Accidental Life
If you will step back in time to high school physics ,you will recall that inertia is defined as:the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or of a body in motion to stay in motion. Quite often this defines every aspect of our lives. We are doing something so we continue doing it. We have never tried something new so we continue to not try it. On a larger scale,inertia tends to take us places we never consciously decided to go. How many of us look at our careers,for instance,and see a plan? More often we start out doing something for the most superficial of reasons:our friend told us to try it;we needed money and the job was available;it looked like a pleasant way to spend the summer;it was all I was qualified for at the time. This occurs in our personal world as well. I am comfortable believing that most of us love our spouses quite dearly. But how many of us actually set out to meet and marry this specific person? Much more common is a marriage of inertia:we are dating someone and as time goes on the relationship progresses because nothing happens to stop it. The natural destination of a relationship unchecked,of course,is marriage. In other words,you take a job just to pay the bills while you decide what you really want to be. Then you meet someone who is fun and attractive and decide to date them for a while. The next thing you know you are married and have a career. You are quite literally sitting in your driveway and you do not remember how you got home.

How often is our unhappiness a product of our fear about the future or our guilt over the past? This autopilot of inertia provides our egos with that very opportunity to wander forward in time and worry about the future or go back in time and find guilt. We cannot be in two places at once;yet when we live by inertia and place our lives on auto pilot,we are hopelessly trying to do just that. Our egos are traveling in time while our physical being – our energy – is happening here and now. So how do we Stop Living by Inertia?

I Thought POPs Was a Cereal
The answer to this is really quite simple. Of course the implementation is so difficult few try. The answer lies in living a life that is Present,Oriented and Purposeful;a life that POPs. The purpose of these articles is to delve into what it means to be Present,Oriented and Purposeful. Create strategies that allow us to reorient our perceptions. We explore what it means to be Present and find ways to stay in the moment when our ego calls us forward to fear or backward to guilt. We have created a Life Manual that uncovers our true goals,tackles time management and creates a road map for us, thus keeping us Oriented toward our goals while achieving them. And finally,we look at the toughest concept of the three:living honestly and Purposefully all the time.

The journey to a Life that POPs never ends. I am honored you have chosen to share some of your jouney with me. The first step of this journey is to make your next step on autopilot your last. Stop moving by inertia and take a look around;see what a miraculous world we live in right here and right now.