Dear LPG,

I want to write about a theory that occurred when I came across a YouTube video. Although I only understood half of what the presenter was trying to convey, it has changed my perspective on how I start each day. 

When I started watching, I had two thoughts. The first was that, as usual, the message was aimed at people much younger and more intelligent than the type of pensioner that I have turned out to be. The second thing that struck me is that (I don’t think I understood half of what was said). The presentation was all about hard work and motivation, things that we older people don’t have to worry about anymore.

I suspect many readers are getting worse and worse at getting into gear in the mornings, and I am a perfect example. I often wonder why I find myself awake, aware of the time and my surroundings, but, having caught up with what day of the week it is and what I need to do, I still stay snuggled under the duvet for far too long.

Being old comes with its advantages.  I rarely have any commitments that I must get up early to fulfil.  I don’t need to rush to get ready for work anymore, and once I have left the land of nod each morning and my reasoning has returned, I can feel myself rearranging my schedule mentally so that I can still achieve all the day’s goals.  But the trouble is that I do this by deciding that most of them can wait until the proverbial tomorrow that never comes, and if I am not careful, it is always the same tasks that suffer and get put into my mental ‘I don’t have to do that today’ box.

We pensioners can agree that there are relatively few things that we have to do at a particular time now because, for many of us, what we do with our time will make little difference to anyone else apart from ourselves. I, for one, have become a master when rescheduling now that there is relatively little to juggle with, but perhaps that is the real problem.  

But back to the video:

Suppose you substitute the references to exams and success for what we pensioners want to achieve and learn what dopamine is. In that case, it makes sense (I have worked out that, put very simply, dopamine is the chemical stuff in our bodies that transmits the message that we need to get up and go). 

The internet informs that Ralph Waldo Emerson first observed, ‘It’s not the destination, It’s the journey’. Though I believe both to be equally important, perhaps, as the video points out, we need to enjoy what we are trying to do and try to get as much out of the trying as the achieving. 

I have always seen the sense in the quotation, but the video gave me another perspective. I believe that most people develop into becoming one of two fundamental sorts of ‘greet the day’ people and, having spent most of my life trying to do it more positively, despite my changed attitude about what I want to do with the rest of my life, this bit of philosophical/chemical advice has made quite a difference to my attitude towards procrastination.

I hope passing it on might be of value to a few of my fellow LPG readers… 

  
TB, Downham. 

TB shares the video, which started her thinking on this subject…

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… some other information she found while researching…

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…and LPG adds some information on today’s celebration…

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