Little, yellow notpads

One character trait I surely inherited from my father is that I am a chronic list maker.  I have at least 6 or 7 little, yellow notepads about the house in various locations.  I journal everything from passing thoughts to up-to-date shopping lists.  This helps me organize and prioritize many areas of my life.  I’m a big proponent of David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) wherin one very functional component for me is to get your ideas, tasks, and priorities out of your head and into a trusted system.  This system for me is an intricate combination of iPhone app, Google Calendars, and my little, yellow notepads.  The reprieve from stress comes from not ‘carrying’ the burden of unfinished tasks with you in what should be your present moment.  You feel secure in knowing that they exist in another dimension, if you will, that is scheduled to be visited, deleted, or moved about the month as is needed and aligned with a flexibility required to extinguish any unexpected small fires.  This ties in well with my quest for spiritual awakening and higher awareness.  I’ve been bopping around listening to Sanskrit sutras trying to memorize them phonetically and incorporate into my mediation.  Using positive reinforcement and self-affirming mantras, I feel, is best approached by following the well-worn path taken by generations of enlightened beings over millennia rather than staring into a mirror a la Stuart Smalley or buying a $1000 kit from a giant man with big teeth and solutions.  Ergo, learn the original language of spirit, derived from mimicking the sounds of nature, to better communicate with that nonlocal plane.  The issue is I can’t write it!  It doesn’t go on my little, yellow notepad!   Having to write something, I woke up this morning and added a little task to my ‘frame’.  Self-actualizing people seem to put into practice an exercise that I quite enjoy.  I took my little, yellow notepad and wrote down every desire and intention in my life that could start with the words “I want…”  These had to fit into 3 categories: 1) What I want materialistically 2) What I want spiritually 3) What I want to contribute to the world.  I’ll not share the list here, but the first is scary and the last is a life-long journey.  I have conspicuously placed this list and will read it aloud every day for the next 21 before I meditate.  That, by the way, is also the number of days I’ve committed to quit drinking.  I look very forward to seeing how many, if any, I will be stroking off my little, yellow notepad.