When you focus on what others are thinking about what you are thinking, you aren’t thinking.  Not very well.*
(Nancy Kline)

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.**
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Being more concerned with what others think about you will prevent your best work.  Anxiety, anger, hurt, worry and perfectionism will all prevent our best thinking and feeling and best work.

Thinking improves after ‘kindness, clarity, ease and genuine interest,’ claims Nancy Kline.  Writer Neil Gaiman admits that for fifteen years or so he was worrying about the next thing and he didn’t enjoy the ride at all.  It’s not about taking pleasure but finding happiness.:

‘Pleasure is short-term, addictive and selfish.  It’s taken, not given.  It works on dopamine.  Happiness is long-term, additive and generous.  It’s giving, not taking.  It works on serotonin. […] More than ever, we control our brains by what we put into them. […] Scratching an itch is a route to pleasure.  Learning to productively live with an itch is part of happiness.’^

Happiness is ultimately about being okay about who we are and what we have and what we are able to imagine out of these and make happen.  Whatever others think about us.

(*From Nancy Kline’s More Time to Think.)
(**Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Ben Hardy’s article: How to Fully Commit to Goals that Terrify You.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: The pleasure/happiness gap.)

When we are grateful, we are most fully alive.*
(Erwin McManus)

Every day, we’re able to lay up treasure in our hearts that we’ll have when, some day, it is needed, perhaps for others, perhaps for ourselves.

It is the kind of treasure that helps us face the most difficult things in life that external treasures never will.  When we bring these out then perhaps, in the words of Iris Murdoch, we are providing something sacred:

‘A sacrament provides an external visible place for an internal invisible act of the spirit.’**

Treasure is everywhere in what we often think of as the ordinary and John O’Donohue’s words gently offer how we can be open to receive it:

‘I place on the altar of the dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.’^

This treasure does not remain inactive and cold within us waiting for the day of need, though, it also makes it possible to be open to even more each new day and in this we are being changed:

‘May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.’^
(John O’Donohue)

(*From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)
(**From Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us: A Morning Offering.)