From the mind of critic: “If we drive the same road to work everyday, but then drive the same road on our day off, do we travel at the same speed? Do we drive with less urgency and more appreciation for our surroundings, when we’re not racing to punch a clock? Do we drive with more urgency and less appreciation of our surroundings, when we’re not racing to punch a clock? Do we ever realize that we’re traveling down the same road? So many of us fall into the same rut, organized by the same routine we follow day after day. Granted, life is basically chaos and we have to explain it in a way that makes sense to us, or we’ll be forever chasing the dragon. These routines allow us to go through life in a liveable way, but also fogs up our consciousness of the here and now when we do something outside of that routine. However, the best way to unfog our consciousness, is to never allow our routines to define who we are, just like we should never let our spontaneaity define who we are.This is where finding balance helps, because it ensures we have both routine and spontaneity, and not more or less of one or the other. How does this balance play out? Instead of driving to work on the same road day after day, we can find a different route. Instead of going with the flow of the wind everytime we’re not working, we should try planning out what we actually want to do. Then when we get used to switching things up, we’ll see that we don’t always have to switch up physical activity, sometimes we just have to switch up our mindset. We could do the same thing but look at it differently, or the same thing just on a different day. It’s all about staying conscious and how we feel, how we’re doing and what we’re thinking. We could drive down the same road a million times, but if we slow down to look, and think about what’s around us, the road will seem completely different. Life is all about the journey of discovery of joy, not about the destination of illusion we’ve built up. There might not be any there there, but having atleast a rough outline of a destination, allows our journey to thrive. A balanced journey does a body good” 🙂