Have you ever seen the movie, "Groundhog Day?" In the movie, Bill Murray played a TV news reporter covering the annual Groundhog Day ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He becomes stuck in time, living the same day over and over again. I wasn't struck by the relevance until one of my teachers, years later, mentioned the movie. Then I realized that most of our lives are like that. We wake up, eat breakfast, brush our teeth, take a shower, drive to work, work our day, eat lunch around the middle of the day, drive home, eat dinner, watch TV and go to sleep. The next day, we do the same. Of course, we have weekends, and we all do have some additional things that we do, but often they are the same repetitive rituals. We create a habitual rhythm that is very hard to break. For some people, even doing something out of order can be uncomfortable. For example, if we forget to brush our teeth before we get in the shower, we feel strange when we get out of the shower and have to brush our teeth, in what we perceive as the "wrong" sequence. Our rhythm has been disturbed, and that is uncomfortable to us. We become - dare I say - robots.Many people never break their rhythms. Maybe, as they age, they watch different shows, eat a few different foods and buy different things, but they still stay stuck in that perpetual robotic rhythm. It isn't until something catastrophic happens - like 9/11 or the Gulf Oil Spill - that they begin to get stirred enough to even consider changing their routines. They're always thinking that someone else is handling everything. In something as important as a Presidential election, barely more than half of eligible voters make it to the polls. In 2008 it was a little more than 57%. In mid-term election years, when people are voting for their Senators, Representatives and many other important matters, a little more than a third usually show up at the polls. In 2006, it was just over 37%. A lot of people are sure speaking their minds about the progress - or lack thereof - that these politicians are making, but many of them didn't even vote.
If you want to make a difference in the world, you have to break out of your rhythm. You have to stop being robotic. Try changing things up a bit. Maybe go to a park, instead of the mall this weekend. Stop at a bookstore on the way home from work, and buy a book that you've been thinking about reading, but just haven't found time for. Just read one page at a time. My life has been changed - dramatically - just from stuff I read in books. Some books it took me months to finish, because I was so busy.
When we stay in our robotic rhythms, life passes by, and at the end of it, we may realize that we didn't make as much of a difference as we would have liked. We forgot to try the Road Less Traveled, once in awhile. We played it too safe. And the world around us suffers from our lack of participation.
Wouldn't now be a good time to wake up from our sleepwalking?
Just Checking,
Alan
P.S. As always, this blog entry is directed at yours truly, too. It's been almost a month since I last wrote a blog entry. Those of you on Facebook get to read my somewhat frequent status updates and comments, but I'd like to do more. I'd like to make more of a difference. I had to put down my iPhone and stop playing the game I was in the middle of, before it got too late to write, again. I'm not judging. I'm talking from experience.
