Okay, so where are you? I know, it’s a silly question. You’re right here! But where, exactly, is “here”? What do you know about it? I’d be willing to bet you could learn a few things. It wouldn’t kill you…..

     It’s really easy to take “here” for granted. It’s also really easy to treat it as though you’re just passing through, but you’re not. Everywhere you go bears a lasting impression of you. You are an agent of change in every “here” you occupy, no matter how brief you think your stay is. And every “here” leaves a lifelong imprint on you, whether you choose to recognize it or not.

     Everywhere you’ve ever been and everywhere you’ll ever go is a complete cosmos in and of itself. No matter how drab or tired it looks to you, there is an infinity of information to be gleaned. Obviously, you’re not going to get it all. But you might be surprised at how much flows in when you don’t even realize it. I believe that everyone’s subconscious has an eidetic memory; everything it perceives gets stored away in the basement of your personal library. Some of this comes up into the conscious as intuition and inspiration. Some reveals itself in dreams. Some of it just stays at the bottom of the pile.

     I believe that your “here” stretches out before and behind you as far as you have come and as far as you will go. Everything you’ve ever done and everything you will ever do is part of your “here”. It really pays to know where you are, because you can relate that information to decisions you must make now. By opening your perceptions to what goes on around you, and caring about your impact and your impressibility, you can apply all the information of your today and your yesterdays to optimizing your “here”. If you pee in this pool, you will swim in pee.

     There are so many excuses for not paying attention to what’s going on around you. You might think that acknowledging something in your presence makes you responsible for it. Sorry bub; whether you admit it’s here or not, it’s here. So take responsibility.

     It might be the bogeyman in the closet or the elephant in the room, and you’re scared to look at it. The fact that you choose not to see it doesn’t lessen its impact on you, it just gives you less control over the outcome. So take a good look.

      You might say you’re in a big hurry. Where are you going so fast? No matter what, you’ll still be “here”. Stop and take a look around! If you don’t orient yourself, you don’t go anywhere that you need to go. You’ll just be lost, right in the middle of the place you’ve always been. And if you don’t take the time to get to know that place, it will always be nowhere for you.

      The place you are feeds you, and you feed it. Think about it; would you close your eyes and start stuffing odd things into your mouth? Do you run blindly down dark halls? If you hear a train coming, do you stop your car on the tracks?

     It is worth paying close attention to what’s going on around you, and committing events and entities to memory. You can put those memories into current context. It can serve as a sort of “operators manual” for your daily life. Your mind will get better and better at plotting trends and intuiting events as you have more information to feed it. And you’ll get to know your self much better, too, as you realize how you interact in all the “heres” of your life.

     Get to know your “here”. It’s always going to be with you, no matter where you go.