Karma, rainbows, and ignoring the numbers (Day 14)

I am a believer in Karma.  Yesterday, I realized that I was taking a negative tone to my writing, both here on my blog and in my attitude toward my writing gigs.  This was spilling a bit into my attitude about my singing as well.

Is it not funny what a change in attitude will bring?  I decided to embrace my writing and drop the pen-name from my celebrity gossip column on one website and stop hiding my writing from my “singing friends” on Facebook.

A morning rainbow!

Then – like clockwork – I received an email about a gig in New York City for April.   I have been invited to sing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at St. John the Divine for the Interfaith Committee of Remembrance’s annual concert.   Quite an honor, plus this will be the first big concert I have done here since moving to New York six months ago.

Karma!

Then this morning, after the nasty winds and storms of last night, I woke up to a rainbow.  Again… Karma!

Of course, I have gotten off track with reading my “Achieve Anything in a Year…” book, so I am a day behind.   Instead of fretting about it, I will run with today’s thought, which comes from Mother Teresa:

Never worry about the numbers.  Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest to you.

There is plenty to take from this quote.  The thing that struck me – and the point the book makes – is that it is “easy to worry about the numbers.”    With my writing on Examiner.com, I have real-time Google Analytics, so I can sit and watch the numbers click up all day long.  It can be mesmerizing.

It can also be a total downer.  While you sit and stare at the numbers, wishing they would go up, hoping that they will somehow miraculously get better, you aren’t doing anything to actually affect a change on the numbers.

The numbers on my Google Analytics go up (or not) whether I sit and stare at them or not.  The only way I can honestly change the numbers is to write more content.   Of course, if I don’t I will wake up tomorrow wondering why I didn’t reach my goals.   Perhaps it was because I frittered away my time staring at the numbers all day long.

So, today my plan is to concentrate on the present.  I will work on the things that can make a difference right here, in the moment.   It isn’t that I don’t care about the numbers, but my little experiment is what happens if I only evaluate the numbers after I have done the work instead of during or in lieu of the work.

Today I will forget about numbers and concentrate on Karma.  It seemed to work pretty well yesterday!