Start Producing a New Soundtrack in your life

​Yesterday, I stopped in St. Paul, Virginia on the way home from a work meeting. I stood on a gravel path that wraps around Oxbow Lake and I remembered.

I just stood there. Remembering.

Back in November of 2018, I stood at that same spot getting ready to run the Oxbow Ultra. Just a few months prior, at a different race, I had failed at my first attempt at completing an ultra. (A distance greater than 26.2 miles).

I came to run in St. Paul that day to prove to myself I could do something I'd become convinced I could not do.

Standing there yesterday was important. Maybe in ways I didn't see coming. As I stood staring across Oxbow Lake and up the mountain that I climbed 6 times that day to get thirty miles in, I recognized there are still plenty of days in my life when I'm convinced there are things I can't do.

Things I can't be. Things I'll never overcome.

Reseach tell us that we all have about 60,000 thoughts a day. Roughly 95% of them are repeat thoughts, and 75% of them are negative. In summary, the Rocky soundtrack may make us feel like taking on Appolo Creed, but OUR soundtrack, the one we hear most, it frequently wants us to believe we have no fight in us at all.

Standing on the edge of Oxbow Lake yesterday was one way for me to lift the needle off the album of my soundtrack. It was one way to tell the automated patterns of my brain to shut up.

Too many of us give the negative thought patterns of our minds free rein. We let them take over our perception of the world and our perception of others and our perception of OURSELVES without a fight.

No wonder they become so repetitive. Thoughts, like us, often follow the path of least resistance.

It felt good standing on the edge of that lake yesterday, looking up that mountain, and asking my mind, what do you have to say about me now?

We all need to go to that place today. To our Oxbow Lake.

To the place where we've overcome, the place where we've exhibited kindness, the place where we've shown generosity, the places where we've been a loving parent or partner or friend. The beautiful places our negative thought patterns often like to leave out as it plays the soundtrack of our lives.

Our thoughts are repetitive. They are almost always negative.

If.

If we allow them to play on without a fight.

Fight them today. Go visit a place of beauty in your life. Because that place DOES exist. Don't let your negative thought patterns convince you otherwise.

Start producing a new soundtrack.