Who Else Would Like To Get Awareness, Even Without Getting Bored? (Convergent Thinking 2)
Everybody cares for awareness, but a few people take it seriously and go beyond the dull surface that awareness seems to demand.
Categorization, the dull part
Before diving into the depth of awareness, it’s paramount that you, my dear reader, start from your standpoint. The question is: When you get into the word ‘awareness,’ what do you feel?
Please help me learn about you by leaving a comment about your idea of awareness!
Meanwhile, I share mine: awareness is appreciating the distinction between in and out and interiorizing boundaries. I cannot prove my idea is correct, but it often helps me eliminate prejudices and improve my convergent thinking. This is my two cents.
Now, let’s have a look at Wikipedia for getting more authoritative insights, which distinguish between two types of awareness:
Peripheral awareness refers to the human ability to process information at the periphery of attention, such as acknowledging distant sounds of people outside while sitting indoors and concentrating on a specific task such as reading.
and
Modern systems theory maintains that humans, as living systems, have not only awareness of their environment but also self-awareness, particularly with their capability for logic and curiosity.
This distinction is foundational for convergent thinking: as awareness is double (peripheral and self) analogously, you converge when your focus connects ‘peripheral’ ideas and those you deem the only relevant until that moment, which have much to do with self and ego. Keep it always in mind to ditch your ego.
All that was dull: let’s get into the funny one!
Goals, the funny part
Goals are the precious pearls that convergent thinking, like oysters, produces. No goal, no awareness. And vice versa.
Goals are about the future. When you set goals, you design your future and make decisions about your present: you act now and aim to reach the goal in a defined future. Goals form the direction: Without defined goals, the train of life and business diverges and derails because they lose tracks on which to travel.
On the other hand, the truth is that you don’t build a sustainable future without fun. So, goals must also express funny aspects of the direction you want to pursue.
Fun is a crucial ingredient of goals: consider it an enabler of awareness as its intrinsic motivation.
Beware: Fun is a motivator, not the aim, like traveling in first class is a motivator, while the purpose is what it enables — business opportunities, for example.
Think of people without goals who wake up in the morning and have to invent how to waste another day. Is there awareness in such lives? Is there fun here? No, it’s the autopilot toward nothing. Instead, people who craft their goals stare at life with the awareness that those goals constitute. Even failures are steps toward awareness: productive failures are steps in learning because they disclose issues and prepare for success.
Reaching goals must be fun because they’ll be tough to pursue. Having fun and being aware is not easy, yet what’s difficult is less obstructive when tackled with joy!
Conclusion
Fun enables goals, and goals enable awareness: This is the simple chain of (convergent) thinking about awareness.
Why connect so apparently divergent ideas such as fun, goals, and awareness?
It’s a convergence exercise, but, more importantly, it’s a connection among intertwined domains of human experience.
Use the feeling of fun as the healthy flag of your daily life. Where there’s no fun, there’s no enablers to setting goals; without goals, there’s no awareness of you and your future. You have fun if you wake up in the morning and are enthusiastic about what you’ll do on the new day. And vice versa.
Conversely, when you’re overwhelmed, everything is tough, and your actions are reactive and lacking direction, that’s the perfect environment where awareness can’t exist.
The environment for awareness is calm and steady: the center of the whirlwind, where everything is still. But the contrast between calm and whirlwind is necessary for awareness to emerge. That’s why the absence of awareness paradoxically facilitates its rise, for those open to converge; it’s like when you laugh out of despair, and in that misplaced laughter, a new point of view comes into view.
Like negative happenings need to evolve into a positive situation sooner or later, in some way, whirlwinds need to converge into awareness.
Do you want to converge, at least a bit, set goals, and have fun? Not easy, but achievable. That’s how to get awareness without getting bored!
Coming soon
Follow me to get the third article of the Convergent Thinking series: 5 Tips for Navigating Divergent Thinking Without Shipwrecking in It (Convergent Thinking 3)
