quit wasting energy on wishful thinking

​I recently listened to Rich Roll interview Tommy Rivers Puzey on his podcast. Puzey - Rivs as he is known in the ultra running community - has been recently battling an aggressive form of cancer. Doctors said he wouldn't live. Then they said he wouldn't live without a ventilator. Then they said he'd never walk. Then they quit making projections.

Last month, he completed the New York City Marathon.

Puzey said something that stuck with me. He said, "I think about how often you waste energy by wishing things were a certain way and they aren't. And how gratitude is realizing you do have control over certain things."

I love how he used the word energy. Because it's true. We all have a certain amount of energy as we enter this new day. The question is, what will we do with it. Will we use it to wish certain things were different? Or will we pour it into the things we actually have control over?

One will lead to feeling empty and without - the other to gratitude.

As I listened to him say, "I think about how often YOU waste energy..." - I felt like he was talking directly to me. Because I know I've been prone to let my energies go there - to wishing lately - and to coming up empty.

He is right, though. Because I have gotten better at how I use my energies. When I feel my energies going off to wishful thinking land, I pull myself back in by telling myself to focus on the moment in front of me.

The moment I actually have some control over.

I guess I've thought of that in the moment place as a place of less anger or sadness than wishful thinking. But Puzel reminded me that place can actually be a place of gratitude. It can be a moment we don't have to wish for, but already have - and we can give thanks for it.

While Puzel was in the ICU at the hospital battling his cancer, his wife would get phone calls from his nurses. They told her that her husband “was doing push-ups beside the bed and situps in bed,” she said. “They’d be like, ‘Dude, you can’t get out of bed and do push-ups in the I.C.U.’”

He never stopped pouring his energies into the moment he had control over.

If you're reading this, you have energy this morning. The question is, where will you pour it. Into wishful thinking, or into something you have control over?