Pay Attention. Do you turn the corners in your daily life and find surprises? Do you understand the signs that are popping up along the way? Navigating my world requires more than simple memory these days. Even common stomping grounds seem different and unfamiliar lately. In living life with heightened awareness to detail and change – in living life with my eyes open for subtle shifts and movements, I see nuances that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Paying attention to my world in a way that makes me feel alive, if not sometimes on edge, has given me new perspectives.

Almost everyday I take the same route to work, walk through the same opening routine, and encounter faces that might be said to hardly ever change at all. But every single day, every moment, every expression, and every experience is a unique opportunity for encounters of vastly different flavors. Pay attention to the shifting of the everyday world.

To awaken in your bed at preciscely 6:30 am every morning and rise to the same activities that you faced the day before may seem hum drum and even boring if you allow the subtleties to escape you. Look at the partner cozied next to you in the sheets. Is his or her hair graying or thinning? Does the sky look lighter than it did yesterday at this time? How did you rest? Can you recall the depth of your sleep or the restlessness of your dreams?

Be alive. Look at each moment and wonder, appreciate, and consider. Take a deep breath, hold it at the top, slowly let it go and feel the softness of your belly. Notice the day, the countenances of those who are familiar and those who are new. Look for the differences, the changes, the shifts in all that you expected to be exactly the same and note how they are not.

Today may not bring a shower of frogs, in tiny little blue boots kind of different – but today will present opportunities for some kinds of change. How will you affect a change? What big or small differences will you make? See the moments that the world opens up for you to insert positive gestures and if it doesn’t seem apparent can you create it for someone else?