WE ARE THE SCULPTORS OF OUR LIVES

I can take a wad of clay in my hands and squeeze and stretch it into some form that I like.  I can squish it all together and start again if I feel like.  I can do this as many times as I want.  Clay is malleable.  It’s easy.

The same is true of that string of experiences that we call our lives.  We shape those, too.  But, we use different tools.  Instead of the fingers and sharp sticks that we use to model clay, we use our thoughts.  We use the sharp tools of our Attention and our Intention.  We use our ideas and expectations.  Life is malleable, too, but it may not seem as easy to change as squeezing clay.

That’s because we stiffen the clay of our experiences with habit.  We constantly repeat patterns of thoughts in an endless loop, hour after hour, day after day.  This is easier than being present in each moment, having fresh experiences and having to make fresh choices, but, it’s a lot less fun.  It’s the difference between being alive and not being alive.  Not being alive is easier.  This gridwork of habit loops is what makes the clay of our lives seem so tough and resistant to change.  The clay is still soft but it’s stuck in a framework of habit patterns.

Who built this mess?  We did!  As a matter of fact, each one of us is pouring energy into maintaining our personal gridwork of habit patterns at this very instant and in every moment of every day.  It is our creation.  We pay the energy bill to keep it lighted.

We could change it, of course, if we wanted to, but that’s another story.

GOOD DAYS

Immersed as we are in the familiar routines of ordinary life, it is easy for us to lose the sense of wonder that we had as children.  Each fresh morning is a new birth filled with bright possibilities.

 

I ask myself, will I make my day a rerun of my yesterdays?  Or, will I see, with clean sight, the chances that are open to me?   Will I see the possibilities?

If yesterday was delicious, I might follow a similar path and set up a version of yesterday that I can enjoy today.  But, I don’t need to be locked into a version of yesterday unless I want to be.  I might have commitments like a job or family ties that seen to lay out the skeleton of my day but the flesh of it, the tone of it, the flavor of it, comes out of my attitudes and expectations.  I get to choose those.

It’s all about choice and choice is about thoughts.  One important thing about thoughts is that I can change them.  They are more or less under my control.  I can contradict a bad-feeling thought by internally changing the subject or I can reward a good-feeling thought by paying attention to it and approving of it.  I need to be noticing what I’m feeling/thinking to be able to do this.  The key is attention.  I need to be focused.  That means that I need to be awake to my feelings in the moment. 

It is true that one thought leads to another.  It is also true that any thought will lead to another that is like itself.  I can enjoy an ascending series of good-feeling thoughts or a descending cascade of miseries depending on my starting thought and my reaction to it. That’s my choice.

Every moment can be a new start.

The best place to start is with gratitude.  If I begin my fresh new moment by saying and feeling “thank you” for good things in my life, I will kick off a positive chain reaction.  This attention to good things will allow me to notice other good-feeling opportunities that I can act on to keep my energy flowing in the right direction.

The better it gets, the better it can get.  The opposite is also true.

We are all chain-thinkers.  We run on habit.  If we take the trouble to redirect our thoughts toward good-feeling ones enough times, this pattern will become our habit.

While our best alternative is to be alert, alive and fully present in every moment, the habit of choosing good-feeling thoughts is a pretty good second choice.

LOVE AND FEAR

Love and fear are the opposite ends of the scale of emotions that bounds human life.  You could call these ends open and closed or expansion and contraction. You could call them pleasure and pain or joy and despair.  You could call them heaven and hell.  You could call them life and death.

Our lives are lived at different points along that continuum.  We can shift our position on the scale, but, being creatures of habit, we commonly gravitate toward a spot on the scale that becomes our comfort zone.  We can hover at the top of the range at joy, passion, enthusiasm, at the bottom of the range at fear, depression, despair or somewhere in the middle at pessimism, frustration, disappointment.

Our habitual territory on the scale, our comfort zone, determines our experience of life.  Some people feel a lot of anxiety if they are not miserable so a happy experience that they have accidentally let in will have to be promptly squelched.  It’s too uncomfortable and threatening.  They fear that something really terrible will happen to them if they dare to feel too much pleasure or if they dare to hope for anything better than their usual flavor.  You have probably met people like this.  Maybe you are one of them yourself.  It’s a popular stance in our culture, a kind of world-weariness that passes for sophistication and wisdom.  There is a lot of it going around.

Just remember that it’s a choice.  You can be “cool”, miserable and self-defeating or you can reach for the stars and be joyful, loving and enthusiastic.  It starts in the privacy of your own mind so no one has to know about it.  Then, when good things start showing up in your life, people who notice will just think that you are “lucky”.  You never have to fess up to being a positive attractor of good things.  It can just be your little secret.

PROGRESS

In the “developed” world the surface of life is changing at a furious rate.  New ideas, technologies, inventions, products and behaviors crash over us and suck us powerfully into an ocean of novelty.  We can hardly get our collective breath.  And, the rate of change is accelerating.  Our video game has been speeded up to such an extent that the images are beginning to blur.  Human generations can hardly find a common language to use to connect with each other as they are immersed in technologies whose generations are unfolding in months rather than decades.  We are dancing faster and faster.

We think this must be progress.  There are so many good things wrapped up in it.  If we are among the winners, we live longer, most of our children get to grow up and we live abundant, easy lives.  If anything, we have too much of everything.  We are fat and we suffer from the diseases of wealth.

Sure, we work longer hours for fewer dollars and live from paycheck to paycheck and feel no security.  We are contract or temporary workers.  We live with anxiety.  Our intimate relationships, if we have any, are strained.  We live in “starter houses” with “starter mates”. Marriages have become revolving doors.  We expect to “upgrade” several times in life.  Computers, phones, cars, houses, locations, jobs, spouses and the myriad of things that we fill our lives with are all up for grabs.  Easy come, easy go.

But, Homo Sapiens is physically, biochemically and emotionally the same creature that lived as a hunter/gatherer on the African savanna all of those ages ago.  We have conquered our planet and climbed to the top of the food chain, leaving a huge swath of extinctions of fellow creatures in our path.  Now, we are flirting with our own extinction and looking for ways to escape the rock that we have long called home.

It doesn’t have to be this way, people.  We don’t need to be this way.  We need to change, deeply, inwardly.  I am here to tell you that we can do that.  Let’s start now.

BEING HERE NOW

Being present in your own life is the same as being fully alive.  It seems silly to even say that.  We all think that we are present in our lives all of the time, at least during waking hours.

The truth is that we are mostly running on habit, conditioned behavior.  Or, we are daydreaming, lost in memories of a past that does not exist or projecting futures that also do not exist.  While we are busy doing these things, we are absent to the present moment which is the only time that does exist.  It is only in this moment that we are alive.  Most of us spend most of our time not being alive and we don’t even notice.

What to do?

Control of attention is the key.  If I can purposely pay attention to exactly what my senses are reporting and to what emotions I am feeling, I am here, now.  It takes effort to do this.  So, at first, it will seem like a lot of trouble to stay present.  My attention may wander back into habitual tracks.  When I notice this, I’ll refocus my attention back in the moment.  It’s a little tug-of-war that I play with myself.  It’s good to keep a sense of humor about this.  If I persist long enough, I will notice something interesting.  I will begin to habitually focus my attention on the present.

What a weird idea!  Habitually being alive!  I’ll settle for that.

HOW WE BECAME THE WAY WE ARE

Unlike many other creatures, humans come with very little in the way of hard-wired behaviors.  Rather than being guided by instinct, we humans rely on learned behaviors and we learn those behaviors from other humans.  This process begins in utero and continues throughout life.  Most of our core ideas are laid down before the age of six when we begin to develop critical thought.  So, who we are today mirrors the psyches of influential people that we met as babies.  Our assumptions about the world were installed then.  Being assumptions, they are invisible to us but they run our behaviors just the same.

When I look back at my life, I see some repeating patterns that I don’t like.  I’d like to change them.  I know that deeply held beliefs control my thinking, choices and behavior.  The problem is that these beliefs are unconscious.  They were laid down while I was unaware and incapable of individual choice.  They are invisible to me.

I’ve learned a way to surface these beliefs.  I bring a pattern of outcomes to mind, like my tendency to keep myself financially minimized, and I ask the question, “What would a person have to believe to get this outcome?” Then, I start to imagine possible answers to my question until I sense that I am getting close to the truth.  This is all theoretical but it can get me to the point where I can begin to install remedies to those undesirable beliefs and change my outcomes.

Sometimes, awareness alone is enough to pop these beliefs.  When the infantile thought meets the light of day it may be so out-of-sync with my adult self that it is laughed off the stage.