A quick question: How have you got to where you are, here, today? A little reflection on your part will establish that it wasn't a careful plan - more like a series or random events. For the lucky ones, you may have always had a picture in your mind of where you wanted to get to. And, in that last sentence lies the secret to where you will get to next in life.

As you know, from time to time, we take a peek at the bizarre behaviour of normal people. We know, from psychology, that normal people - that's you and me - are crazy. Sometimes, we don't need psychology to tell us this...

I've been doing a lot of travelling over the last week and have had my fair share of stops to fill the car's tank. It may be peculiarly French (strange how those two words seem to go effortlessly together!) but, you see all human life at the self-service filling station. Here's what I've noticed in the last three days:

A guy kicking the living sh*t out of a petrol pump because, having filled up it wouldn't print a receipt.

A guy almost undressing himself - jacket off,wrist-watch off, tie tucked into shirt and, wait for it, a fresh pair of disposable latex gloves - to fill up with diesel. And, then, there was the srub-down afterwards!

Best of all - and this is quite a common one - a guy who took seven minutes to fill his tank. The first minute or so was normal - the machine filled it until the pistol automatically stopped. For the next six minutes the guy drip-fed the tank, with all the precision of a surgeon performing open-heart surgery, to fill the tank up to the amount of exactly €60... I know this because I was next in line! When he'd finished, he spent another thirty seconds shaking the end of the pistol into the tank - just like you'd see a guy in the gents toilet... you get the picture!

My kids (grown-up kids, actually) ask me how I don't get out of the car and kill some of these people. My reply is that, without this kind of carry on, what would I have to write about!

We all need to keep pinching ourselves... to check that we are, in fact, alive. This may sound silly or facetious but, in fact, it's a necessary part of what we need to do every single day of our lives.

We've so much going for us in this life - in terms of the joys of everyday life, the opportunities life offers us, the chance that we have, every single day, to be a positive force in the lives of those whom we touch. But we also have something major standing in our way... the brain between our ears.

Our brains developed over a protracted period of time - from about 1.8m to 10,000 years ago - when life was very different. We developed a whole suite of psychological defence mechanisms to enable us, firstly, survive and, then, thrive. Life is different in the twenty-first century but our brains have not caught up. Nor are they likely to without a considerable amount of intervention on our part.

You may have noticed that I've used the word brain - deliberately so because that is the physical manifestation of our mind. Our mind is what our brain does. How our brain is wired is crucial to how we use our mind. And our brain is wired to distance us from reality and blind us to all the good things that I mentioned a few moments ago.

Through constant, consistent, committed, focused, regular and disciplined attention we can, quite literally, rewire our brains. Regular mental exercising, or meditation if you will, activtates parts of the brain that no other remedy touches! Regularly checking to see how you feel alerts you to the reality of the moment - it's an effortless shortcut to momentary self-awareness.

So, as I said right at the beginning, you need to get into the habit of pinching yourself to see if you are, in fact, actually alive. If you don't, you'll be physically going through the motions but your normal mind will have divorced you from all the good things that life has on offer.