How to trust your instincts

When your phone is your guiding star.

How do you choose who or what to trust?

The red dot notifications? The sponsored ads? The BBC? Your mate that read something, somewhere, and forgot the crucial bit (cough. Usually me)

When our attention is constantly disrupted by external stimulations, how do you know what is important? What really should be getting your eyes at that moment?

I don’t know about you, but I need space to think, ideally on my own.

And I need to do.

Somehow moving whilst doing, helps my filing cabinet sift information, memories and conversations as I go. The fungi of my mind connecting pieces, and pretty much every time I’ll have an ‘a-ha’ moment.

Meetings, events and reading needs the yin to it’s yang, an opportunity to let settle leaving the essentials to emerge like gold in a pan.

Some people run, others knit, I go and garden.  I think the ‘outside’ part is universally useful for all.

In one of my favourite collections, ‘Daily Rituals’ Mason Currey notes how great minds, artists, writers and thinkers spent their time and got to work. Almost all included a daily walk. Austin Kleon writes how you ‘come to your senses’ when you walk. He says it is a ‘way to find possibility in your life where there doesn’t seem to be any left’.

Our screens, alarms and algorithms have numbed our senses and furthermore,  our trust in our own.

Dangerous times; if you don’t trust yourself, can you trust your choice of who you give your attention to?