Beautiful Models: The Mental Reset

Every moment is a fresh beginning. (T. S. Eliot)

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Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“This is not just a quote. It’s a Tool. It encodes a potential Practice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say you want to do activity x, and for that you’ve allotted a certain amount of time. And let’s say you mess up.

What’s the best way to approach the situation?

For me, for a long long time, the default reaction was a feeling of guilt. Depending on the (perceived) magnitude of the mess, I’d often get into ‘Ah, what-the-heck mode’, meaning ‘I messed up, so I might as well go all the way’, which would trigger yet more guilt, in a downward spiral of self-inflicted misery.

That’s where the linguistic-tool comes in. What it does, is perform a mental reset, activate the problem-solving mode, and remind me to focus on what I can control.

What happened is now outside my control; what’s within my control is how I respond to it.

It doesn’t matter what happened before; the only thing that matters is what I do now. 

How can I use the remaining time most effectively?
How can I beautify the remaining hours of the day?

The Tool can be applied to both the micro and the macro level, to the timespan of a day… or a lifetime.”