Prompt of the Day
Prompt #15
Are you living by surviving or are you living for living? If you feel like you’re stuck in a survival mindset, spend some time today pondering why that is. What is one thing you could do today that would make you feel alive? Give it a shot.
This might take all day.
SUMMARY of Article:
I was not expecting this kind of topic. I almost tossed it back for a new one, but in the end, I’d be breaking my own rules before the challenge even began. This topic requires a bit of introspection for me. I will be splitting the concept into three parts and writing reflections associated with each in a condensed version of this mind stream by the end of the day.
As some resounding universal idea or state of mind highlights itself for me, I will follow the inkling as far as I can. The hope is that this practice will lead me to an expanded viewpoint. In the best case, may it stretch my understanding and work to loosen the hold of past experience and future expectations. Instead of allowing present instincts to guide me into a gentle lesson, an insight was gained. The truth doesn’t have to be brutal to be told. Though the initial interactions can appear this way, over time, it is a welcome companion as it reflects with the most clarity compared to any type of survival mindset. I hope that this exercise serves anyone reading it as an example of whatever led you here, to begin with.
This is my personal reflection on survival mindsets as seen through the lens cultivated in me.
PART ONE: SURVIVAL MINDSET
I’ve been pondering this throughout the morning. I’m not sure where to start because no thoughts are materializing fully.
The outcome is unsettling. Like I’ve just received a mysterious invitation to a faraway place, and now I must decide if I will answer the call to action with action. Or reject it with inaction and tending to present-course maintenance.
This experiment is already exciting for me. The question pulled pictures from my imagination, like rabbits and roses from a magical top hat. Each offers a look at potential outcomes and expectations based on what I currently contain. This insight leads me to new questions. What am I choosing to see for my future? How do I view my past? How do I see myself in the aftermath of these two agendas clashing?
This exercise has the potential for so many mindset-related growth experiences. It also offers the tiniest margin of overload and mental breakdown, but I like my odds.
So, back to survival mindsets. What are these for me? The first idea that sticks to the wall; Vulnerability is weakness. Don’t let anyone see. This feels very at home in some portions of my experience. It’s definitely lifted a wall that I’ve hidden behind most of my life. It often comes with conspirators.
Thoughts like; If I appear strong, no one can judge me for my weaknesses.
If I say how I really feel, it might be used against me.
I can handle the burden on my own,
I’d instead handle it alone than have to experience rejection in such a personal area central to my core values and individual conditioning.
They will leave anyway. If they don’t, they want to.
When I tap into that vein of thought, the foundation under me starts to shake. It’s all I can do not to search for the exit and disappear by blending into the backdrop and allowing something else to take center stage.
Suddenly I can see my hopes and dreams from the view of scrutiny under these impressions. I call this place, this state of mind, purgatory. The state of being hyper-focused on the present or future through the lens of past phantoms. These factors come together messy for me. It’s like one grabs the others’ strings and starts tearing and twanging the lines causing them to vibrate out of harmony and all at once. The rush of chaos that ensues reminds me of a million real and imagined reasons to run, jump, and disappear into the walls of whatever timeline is threatening to swallow me whole.
Like the mother of pearl sweeps in to surround an irritation and make the instances formed around less painful to endure, what it produces is eventually priceless and something only the experiencer can understand and explain. But the insight can be so sweet if it’s reflected on until what it teaches can apply more universally. A sensation, a taste, an experience rather than a visual representation.
Because my mental and emotional compositions shift and, in best cases, grow rather than fracture. It stands to reason that what worked once won’t work forever after every scenario. We are meant to adapt and grow through what we pass along the way. As crucial as these mechanisms were, their eventual release is equally important.
The more I ponder the idea, the more I realize that I’ve given various survival mentalities an upstairs space to burst wide open and spread their shadowy roots. Some have grown unchecked well-intended tendrils wrapping around my heart to constricting its natural beat.
Bit by bit, my tendency toward survival over liveliness tends to shift my natural peace into a playground for its toxifying best friends… fear, greed, neediness, jealousy, bitterness, poor hard-earned lessons.
It’s humanly impossible to see clearly through the static these noisy conversationalists produce. Like sitting at a campfire after a long week of personal battles, you want to breathe out to the trees. Bob can’t keep from talking loudly to Tom about the stocks that aren’t quite meeting his expectations while Barb is on about some woman in their shared Yoga class is doing such and such with so and so with Nancy.
I imagine myself closing my eyes in that situation instead of opening my mouth and letting the annoyance flow. I poured it quietly into the trees. Expecting their timeless good humor and ability to offer life sustenance without all the accolades I’ve required in moments where I’ve forgotten myself. Their quiet resilience motivates me to act in harmony. I breathe in their offering and breathe out what’s toxic to me and desirable to them. Why wouldn’t frustration, anger, sadness, fear be the same? I like to imagine releasing the dark clouds building in me out and into the branches of a wise old willow. It picks them up eagerly as if listening to a good friend. I’m convinced, like me, everything organic love stories.
We see toxic negative moments as food for thought and a critical point on the route toward the best outcome. Maybe that’s why my heart craves nature, alone time, music, art, and emotive expressions of life when I’m feeling twisted or weakened. These features are bursting with potential signs and symbols to help me better understand my current environment.
I feel so much better after spending time around green things. Soaking in their branches, blades, and pedals. Basking cradled in their shadows and hollows that consume the unnatural vibrations, sucking them out of me like a vacuum to a visibly dirty carpet. Maybe nature consumes negative output the same way its contents consume our CO2, endlessly hungry to balance me and bring my vibration into harmony with their own. Perhaps since what we produce is crucial for their survival, they’ve developed a mechanism to cater to our mental, emotional, and spiritual chemistry. Our health and well-being are vital to our ability to grow. The need for mammals of all kinds is braided into the DNA spread through their boughs and leaves.
Tree’s are protectors and sanctuaries. But is this mantra the product of a survival mindset? A deep-rooted need to survive by gaining the approval of others and saving them from themselves because I’m afraid. Or because I’ve known what it’s like to lack protection and sanctuary, and I don’t desire to leave anyone in such a space if I can help it.
I’ve had a deep sense of connection to trees since I found out what my last name meant. A Grove is a group or cluster of trees. I have a relatively large family. Each tree in that cluster bore vastly different traits, which led to a deeper understanding of loving differences and fostering unique growth instead of forcing an Aspen to show up as a cherry tree. It wouldn’t fit in no matter how hard it tried because it doesn’t produce blossoms or berries. It might be the most beautiful Aspen in all the world, but if it’s trying to fit in, in a field of cherry trees in the middle of May, it would seem out of place.
I’m a little Oak tree in a big grove full of unique and beautiful tree varieties. As a sapling, I lived off of stories fed to me by each. They made the storm raging around me more palatable. All the while, my roots dug in, quietly spreading through the words raining down. Water falling over the edge of a cliff. Me being the once empty region forever changed beneath. Maybe even flat surface over time worn down by the waterfall flowing from above, creating a pit for the water to crash into. It wears away at the rock until its basin grows deep enough for the source to see its own majesty with the clarity of a crystal pond. The impact zone casts rainbows of light over everything surrounding its entry point. Offering refreshing mist to hungry trees and valleys surrounding.
A seedling can dream.
After 4 hours of asking the question and being present, I asked these questions this morning; What is my purpose? How can my past experiences be deemed positive, allowing the lessons to cross over into positive mechanisms aiding me in the art of seeing things with honest, compassionate mercy? Are my actions being overshadowed or impacted by my previously helpful survival techniques? Have these evolved into mindsets? If so, do they actually serve me, or have these tendencies become my worst enemy?
That got me thinking about roots. Which brought to mind the term I’m tasked with pondering. Self-inflicted. Yes. But if the word was a command. And that command was speaking to a completely unbiased, universally connected supercomputer. What would the prompt be suggesting? MINDSET. I looked it up from as many angles as came to mind or found me through the search commands I started sending my laptop web browser. By definition, it is a mental attitude or inclination. A fixed state of mind.
Does that even exist in me?
A fixed state of mind?
Yes. I feel like I can see a hundred feelings and smells and visuals rising to meet the queries.
The more fixed, the more powerful it becomes. The more docile and undecided the mindset, the less helpful, the less potent the potential outcomes become. Touch a pendulum and push just a little. The item at the end won’t extend to its farthest reaches, to say the least. The more holistic the command, the broader its space, and the outcomes become more pointed and specific. The moments My inner alchemist mixes up a dose of anger, the more centered my attack becomes. If I carry baggage or survival mindsets from my timeline into any moment after they first manifest to protect me. Just because I have a steak one night doesn’t mean I form favorites and opinions over it across the board. What was specialized in on one occasion may be reduced to someone’s job or something they do resentfully to live. God Forbid.
This brings me back to trees. Good soil, good atmosphere, good substance equals growth and expansion in the quest to touch the clouds that carry water and source for life.
In conclusion, I disappear. My survival mindset causes me to blend and disappear in a narrative. I look for the story, the potential picture extending around my specific puzzle piece. The deeper the trauma, the higher the mindset that balances the burden of tragedy and eliminates the triggers releasing fears’ chemical warfare internally. The deeper the situation resonates or vibrates humanistically, the deeper it extends to find sustenance needed to survive the drought, the flood, the maelstrom in its surrounding. In the final stages of trauma, I believe spirit, mind, and soul will separate themselves to varying degrees from the body. This separation protects my mentality from the environment until I can better grasp the more profound meaning or lesson.
The act of slowing my breathing. Shut down and overrule the emotional response loop created by the flood of chemicals released throughout the body due to information translating into trigger mechanisms removing elements that will excite into action or turn heel run from danger. My tree tends to blend in, shapeshift to suit the needs of its surroundings. It’s how I learned to survive. That is the Survival mindset that comes to mind repeatedly, so it will be the one I focus on for this exercise.
PART 2: LESSON: Take away from the pondering sesh.
This mindset has been both helpful and harmful. When I focus on everything else through its personalized scope, it starts to see everything as a potential target to be studied and understood. This serves me in storytelling and daily interactions as long as it isn’t attached to stress or indecision of some kind. I’ve found these cocktails turn best-case scenarios sour with time.
Storytelling is a powerful survival tool. It helped me stay three weeks at the bedside of someone I love imagining the best outcomes where we are running and laughing. He beat me by a long shot in the end. The two of us racing with his actual feet still attached and healed from the damage they were recovering from in a medically induced coma. I Wrote 55 chapters of an epic storyline that came to keep me company in that quiet hospital room surrounded by the company of mechanical purrs and regular beeping.
Part of me couldn’t close its eyes without seeing the shadows threatening to swallow the resting figure piece by piece. Another was right there to combat that inkling and reject the notion that anything but the best outcome was possible. It wasn’t the first time I felt I’d failed the little miracle I’d promised to protect on entry. The more deeply that fundamental desire was challenged, the higher got lost in that imaginary world that explored a hero coming to life through exposure to purpose.
Every color came to life in the environments surrounding the characters I followed. Every lesson gleaned from the battle of witts ever faced and overcome, now on display. Encoded and defused into the DNA of the story its reflection inevitably produces.
The enchanted forest and valley and mountain bleeding into existence through the tip of my borrowed ballpoint into a college rule notebook crinkled and torn at its’ edges from the tough love it received. It had to. It was the only thing standing between me and me crumpling under pain of seeing my baby brother with a tube down his throat. It’s like Adderal. For someone who hasn’t experienced ADHD, it is an accelerator. It zooms in the focus and opens the mind to receive. For someone with an overactive sense stuck in survival mode after being unsettled by internal and external reactions to environmental factors. The less expected, the more destructive.
Lesson. Some thoughts and states of mind can and should be abbreviated in the time spent dwelling in it.
Maybe that’s why the presence of the mind through spurts of rest and motion is what keeps our internal chemistry in balance. Making being presently invaluable to the growth and positive reflections.
PART 3: What would I do today, right now, to feel alive?
Oh my gosh, this one is easy. Looking back, I might sit in the rain. It’s sprinkling raindrops and snowflakes intermittently on this end. I might look for some cold running water to dip my feet in. Maybe I couldn’t resist the sparkling sun dancing out from behind a cloud just right and followed the glimmers right into the brisk flow. Imagining my breath catching in the excitement sends an excited shiver down my spine. I’ve done something similar to that, so I will dream big. I would fly into the sunrise in a hot air balloon. I’ve always wanted to. I think it would be the most magical experience, drifting in a light breeze watching little toy cars passing along underneath. I would search through music until I stumbled on something so good I couldn’t help but listen and dance and imagine beautiful things. I would have an extra cup of water than I might if I didn’t go get one right now.
I would sit quietly soaking in the cool winter air until goosebumps covered my entire outer surface. I would think about bubbles of dark ick drifting away with each out breathe and picture some negative affiliation with the excretion. And little bolts of light and electricity building and sparking to life with every deep inhale until I am glowing and lifting away from the ground. Surrounded in light and energy, the heavyweights I’m releasing in bubbles. Each exhale topples like rocks to the ground as they solidify and fall away from me until they form a mountain beneath my feet. Magma pouring in molten rivers from the mouth of a volcano, reaching and crawling toward the bodies of water surrounding. Over time, new worlds flourish, and growing life feeds new life in as many varieties as it chooses to arise.
I choose flight. I prefer the endless potential of remaining weightless, morphic energy in a dense and heavy world full of contracts and intertwined strings of tangled storylines. I will be a character in my narrative capable of challenging and conquering each and every task and barrier glittered over the horizon. Gathering treasures wherever I go in the form of insights. It’s funny how imagining what I would do to experience joy leads to the desire to express it outwardly.
I hope this insight is helpful in some way. I am new to the prompt writing business, so this might come across as clunky and wordy, maybe even flighty, but I am learning and look forward to improving my perspective each time I write a prompt over the 31 days of this journey.
May life approach us beautifully today. And might we all learn to accept and fully receive it.