Sometimes the arc of change in our life bends so gradually that we hardly notice the change in trajectory. Other times, there are moments that we can point to which we know were the beginnings of a new course. Britney Spears was the catalyst for one such change in my life.
One day, years ago, while sitting with friends, someone mentioned her name, I forget the context now, but I remember my reaction. I had a strong opinion about some facet of Briteny Spears’ life, and it totally caught me off guard. This may not be unusual for many people, but this was VERY unusual for me.
The thing that you have to understand is that I have never been a fan of her music….Okay, I tapped my toe once or twice to “Baby One More Time”. I am of the right age and I do have a soul. But, I never deliberately read a supermarket tabloid that covered her, I didn’t have friends that were in the habit of talking about her, and actually, I actively try to avoid celebrity gossip wherever it exists. I remember being uncomfortable with the idea that somehow this opinion that I held had crept past my guard and buried itself in my brain. I wanted to know how it got in there.
I was sitting on my couch, watching tv in the living room of my rental basement suite when it hit me. In between two shows, I heard a newscaster’s teaser which included a little nugget of celebrity gossip. I flicked the channel and I caught a glimpse of a headline about Britney Spears. I didn’t stop to watch it, but a little nugget of information had already made its way into my head. After a little more channel surfing, it became plainly clear; there is no escaping this stuff on television. You can take in LESS of it if you try, but there is no way to have NONE of it without pulling the plug. This is not groundbreaking news to you, I’m sure, but it was an important revelation to me at that time.
The thing is, around that same time in my life, I was struggling to “find time” for all sorts of things that I knew that I wanted to do, or that I thought I “should” do. Now that I knew that I had been participating in a passive celebrity gossip course while simultaneously bemoaning the fact that “there’s nothing good on TV!” I recognized that I actually had a priority problem, not a time problem.
At that moment, I realized that I couldn’t complain about not having enough time when I used mine so poorly. Cable was cut. I set out down a new path.
This is not the start of a story of how I went on to become an astronaut. Actually, from an outsider’s point of view, my life largely looked the same. What changed is that I had distilled a simple concept into a guiding principle that I would use to help me make decisions for the rest of my life; do more of the things that are interesting and empowering at the expense of the things that are not.