NO REGRETS

This week I want to share my evolving inquiry regarding having no regrets. You may be thinking we all have regrets. I want to challenge this idea and say we all have lessons and missed opportunities. Once we know, we know. And before that, we don’t know, so no regrets. This present moment is a new opportunity to live with no regrets. Have you ever encountered a Rubik’s Cube and not had the urge to pick it up and solve at least one side? Me neither! I have to give it a go for a few twists and turns to line up the colors to do my best to create order amongst the chaos of color. Why do most of us have the urge to pick up the Rubik’s Cube? It is because the ego mind is a problem solver. The problem solver/ego mind is always thinking. In fact, it’s hooked on problem-solving to the point that it seeks out issues or problems in our everyday lives to feel important and maintain control.

Back in 1974, in a college class in Hungary, Ern? Rubik had no idea the impact the 3D model he’d created to demonstrate movement to his students would have on the world. For starters, with 43 quintillion variations on this six-sided design with fifty-four individual squares, it took him a whole month to solve his own puzzle, which he’d referred to as his Magic Cube. After that, when it got packaged as a toy, Rubik assumed it would only appeal to math and science geeks. Boy, he sure did underestimate the commonality that resides throughout the human species.

A Rubik’s Cube sitting atop a lonely desktop is to our ego mind what a big, juicy steak left unattended is to a hungry pooch. And there are over 500 million Rubik’s Cubes in circulation to back up that analogy, making it the most popular puzzle in the history of the world. The Rubik’s Cube has been giving our brains something to do for over four decades. And the creation of the internet and YouTube tutorials have expanded the craze exponentially. But your ego mind goes beyond simply seeking out problems; it also creates them. Lots of them. My inquiry has led me to want to share with you how to spot this pesky habit of creating problems where they are nonexistent. Have you ever caught yourself doing that—creating a problem where there was none? Unless you’ve never been in a relationship with another human being, you’ve done this.?Due to our primal instinct, humans tend to look at things through a negative lens. It takes the daily practice of looking at your perspective and finding the positive in the perceived negative. I am not saying you should ignore or bypass real issues in your life. Today, get curious and investigate if the ego mind is misperceiving situations. Can you let go of seeing things as a problem? Can you switch to seeing the opportunity in the obstacle? Investigate and question your perspective to see if you can create 3-4 other views that prove the one you are stuck on is incorrect. Be the architect of your mind and redesign your perspective. Next week, I will continue to share insights and tools for living a life with no regrets. Hooyah!