Cleaning out my pantry and getting rid of old t-shirts is the easy stuff.

Clearing out the clutter in my mind is going to take a whole lot longer….

I am still doing my morning sitting and my quiet drive into work. What’s been apparent to me on that morning drive, though, is just how noisy my thoughts can be. I can obsess on anything and roll things over and over in my head endlessly. I mean anything–even a blog dedicated to simplifying my life! Truth is, much of this paragraph I composed in my head on the drive to work this morning. And while I was composing and recomposing sentences in my thoughts, I was completely unaware of what I was really doing at that particular moment, namely: driving a ton of metal down a busy highway surrounded by a dozen or so other vehicles…most likely  driven by equally thought-absorbed individuals.

It amazes me how much of my life I live on auto-pilot. I have so many daily, routine actions–driving to work, walking to my office, making the coffee, etc–that more often than not I am completely tuned out to my surroundings and entirely in my head.

So: today’s prompt is a tool for breaking out of my daily somnambulism and waking to the moment.

On the drive into work, when I caught myself wrapped in my thoughts, I used that moment as a cue to look at what was right in front of me.

Go ahead and try it now (I just did–took a pause from writing this post, just to observe all those things that sit around me everyday, unobserved). Look, and what do you see?

Just like focusing on breathing, taking a moment to observe what I am doing, and where I am doing it, forces me to be in the moment.

I love watching movies, and I love to watch them closely for all the details of frame and set and shot. If only I could observe my own actions and surroundings with the same degree of attention!