The Gift of Loving Where You're At
/I'm a rare breed of Tampa native who's never left my home town.
Though I love traveling, I like to say, "The best part of traveling is flying home into the Tampa airport."
(Granted, Tampa does have one of America's greatest airports, in my very biased opinion.)
I have many friends who've left and moved on and others who're transplants, so I'm usually the anomaly. Sure, the complaints that I hear about why people don't like this city are sometimes ones I agree with, but I've found the practice of finding what I love about this town to be a great practice.
As I drove through Tampa's streets this morning, seeing the pink and purple clouds above downtown and admiring once again my fair city, I realized this perspective of paying attention what I love more than what I don’t isn’t just about this town.
Loving where you're at doesn't end with just finding what is great about your location, it can also apply to a period of time in your life, be it a single moment or a period of months or years.
Our brains are trained to look for what's not working. It's an evolutionary adaptation that helped us stay alive. Psychologists call this "negativity bias" and it’s the reason why we're often distracted by the things that we don't like, are threatening, or seem like they won't work.
So if you find yourself only being able to see "what's wrong" and have to work extra hard to see the good, it's not because there's anything wrong with you. Believe it or not, it's actually something that's right with you.
But here's another gift of the brain: it's highly adaptive.
That means that with practice, you can train your brain to acknowledge what’s good. Over time, you'll find it's not so hard to find things that you love about where you're at.
The gift of loving where you're at is something that you can give yourself everyday, even in dark times or amidst a struggle.
The sooner you begin, the more the present moment can become a gift that keeps on giving and one that follows you wherever you go.
I'd love to hear:
What’s something that you love about the place where you're at right now?
After acknowledging that, how do you feel?
