Last week I lived one of the longest days of the year. My clock says it was 26 hours* but I think it was far more than that. 

When I think there are little chances to be surprised by new situations, events, or people. The endless days of Walking Mentorship remind me how wonderful it is to be alive, and maybe this is where the key to open the door of time-stretching lies. 

Because I am more aware of what I don’t know, I am also more conscious of what’s around me, especially the people I walk with and their stories. When you pay attention and become truly present in every situation (I think you need to put your phone away in this part of the reading), you’ll likely get to have more life experiences overall. 

I often entertain my brain, thinking about the notion of time. One natural conclusion seems that my days slow down when I shift my attention to something novel. When I spent time focusing on and thinking about new surroundings or talking with new people, the time in my mind does not match the time in my watch.

It is always a moment of Awe, a mixture of wonder, surprise, and sometimes fear to see it going away. 

Science helps us to understand part of this beautiful phenomenon. We can partially explain what happens inside our bodies with the role played by hormones and neurotransmitters, which are two types of chemical signaling that are responsible for the behavior and attitudes of the organism. The more we walk in nature, the more we produce them, and that we know.

I believe that there is something else.

When you allow your brain to retain richer memories of what’s happening, it enables you to create the so-called emotional anchors. Each person is an endless universe and a potential source of valuable lessons. Usually, those are triggers wrapped around colors, sounds, and smells. 

For me, the most powerful ones are stories that I refer to as pictures framed in real life. When I revised those adventures, days, months, and years later, it becomes easier to understand how awesome those people that cross my life are. 

We can agree to disagree, but emotional anchors are useful from an evolutionary perspective, they kept us alive for thousands of years. Still, it could also prove to be helpful to remember something amazingly good, like aligning your purpose with your future actions and become more clear about your next steps in life. 

Whenever I fall off the road, I close my eyes and think about a particular person or story, and I am immediately closer to be back on track. This is one of the reasons I always put together a perfectly imperfect video from WM programs. You never know when you are going to need it. I leave you with a glimpse of our last Life Purpose Review program. Was it a week-long? A month? Most likely it will last a lifetime to each of us that was there.

If you are thinking about continuing walking towards the best version of yourself in 2020, be aware that the WM program dates are already available on the website. If you join until the end of December you can save some good money, as well. Until then.

   Keep walking with me,

     Joao Perre Viana

Founder of Walking Mentorship

*  Last week we “fall back” by setting clocks back one hour (i.e., gaining one hour). But exactly on the same day, I crossed the border from Spain to Portugal (1-hour time zone difference), so I guess I really had a day with 26 hours, to say the least :)