http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04unbox.html

Note this passage from the above cited article, which is related to a point I've been making for quite a while...

"Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

Paying attention keeps the perceptive brain awake. It also slows down the passage of time, producing some traction on the slippery slope of mortality. To keep the decades from flying by, wake up regularly under a different sky, in a different climate, hearing a different language. If you can't travel the world, at least take a different route to the shower every morning. Stop; the new day is a DIFFERENT DAY than all the others you have lived; proceed to shower.

This awareness helps to mitigate the redundancy through which many repetitions become a single experience. How many times have I stumbled from my bed to the shower? Thousands, but it's as if it is a single experience, and all collapse into a single moment, a flash of time. Decades of mornings go by, with only the differences registering as meaningful. That which changes from day to day registers in life's journal. The rest is a chain of dittos. This is one reason I refuse to "watch the news" at 6 pm every day (there are plenty of others...)

Conscious Deliberate Awareness. Awareness is the body's sensual perception. Deliberation, the rational mind, and Consciousness the core perceiver. To be fully functional in all three is the key to a calm, centered life.

The NYT article also talks about "... a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements".

Indeed. To be like an interplanetary spaceship, making, tiny, instantaneous course corrections based on new information which we receive as we proceed. Realizations that as one proceeds, our destination may well change along with the landscape. This is the big problem with religion, and other such spiritual "practices". They are systemically incapable of subtle self-correction. The Path has never been trodden. The Destination is forever new. This is the ancient core! What more is worth seeking?