I have had a good year. The fact of it keeps surprising me because I am so used to problems. And recently I have been experiencing longer and longer stretches without problems. Life just seems to be unfolding without them. In their place have been a lot of things to appreciate. Not only have things felt really fun and worthwhile, I have also not had the sense that sometime soon the other shoe will drop and life will get all crappy again.
This “fun goodness” is so noticeably different from much of my experience that it has forced me to consider its cause. As far as I can tell, there are two basic reasons my problems have been replaced with worthwhile opportunities.
I have stopped thinking in terms of problems. I wake up, there is stuff that I have to do, and that is pretty much that. It happens every day and shows no sign of stopping until my last breath. My mantra for the stuff that comes up each day is “What else did you have planned?” The long version would be “I thought you were here to have a human life. You know, one where you have stuff to do for 70 to 80 years, then you are done doing stuff. What else did you have planned?” When did having a life become a problem?
Since becoming a parent and a dedicated meditator, I have developed the habit of considering my motivations before taking an action. The most important questions seem to be ”Am I about to take an action based on faith?” and “Am I about to take an action based on love?” If I am, the action seems to contribute to “fun goodness.” If not, the action seems to create problems. It really matters why I am doing what I am doing in terms of how the results affect my life.
My teachers suggest that we not make a burden of our duties. Who needs problems, anyway? They just create a negative charge around something we have to do and might learn from and profit from, if we don’t expend all our energy making life a problem. The energy we don’t waste having problems can be poured into actions taken from a place of faith and love, and life can start feeling sacred and sweet.
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“What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now.” – Buddha
Even though life is sometimes messy and unpredictable, there is one constant — opportunities will come and go. And the reality is that opportunities are abundant when we are open to them. When we are open to new things and eager to branch out of our safe, cozy, comfort zone, we can open up a world of new possibilities. And it all starts with one easy step: Play the game, and get on the court. Landmark Forum’s self-improvement course teaches the power of getting on the court in life vs. sitting in the stands.
Think about a sporting event. Spectators cheer from the stands but never put themselves at risk. They are not the ones taking any risks or making anything happen. Rather, they sit, watch, judge and wait, while the players are full of life. They are the doers, making life happen and work with them. They see an opportunity and go for it. They take risks and play hard. Of the two types of people, which would you rather be?
More often than not, I have been a spectator in my own life. I let life happen to me and fell into deep, moldy holes. The only way to pull me out of each depression episode was to take responsibility for my own life and start making calls – getting my butt up out of “self-pity-ville” and taking action to guide me in a better direction. It started with one single step forward, by getting onto the court of my own life.
If you look at your life as a bestselling book or blockbuster movie, how is yours playing out? What kind of picture are you in? Is it full of depression, mistakes, regrets and secrets? Or are you the hero in your own starring role? Are you in a role that challenges and excites you? Do you seize the day and make the moment matter? The opportunity here is to dream of possibilities and things beyond the traditional confines of cultural and social acceptability. Whenever there are areas of our lives we are unhappy with, often, the human tendency is to ignore them … to simply act as if they are not an issue; out of sight, out of mind.
For example, maybe you are unhappy with your job. I was the queen of bitter job certainty. I lived the “this is how things are” card to its death, meaning I was a victim of the negative perpetrations of my job. I worked with people who didn’t understand me or respect my contributions. They always made me feel like an outsider, and I always had a boss who seemed to have ulterior motives. I could never trust them. No matter where I went, what city, this job was where I was. I’d quit one company and start working at a completely different company, sometimes even different industries and would always find myself crying in the bathroom on lunch break.
I would tell myself it is normal to cry at work and this is just how life is supposed to be. I would come home and complain to whoever would listen about how bad my job was, how lame the people I worked with were and how I wasn’t getting what I deserved. That’s a lot of “me, me, and me” talk if you ask me. I was pretty self-consumed and exhausting the victim role. I kept playing out my same reality over and over until one day I was talking to a friend. I was complaining about my new boss and the work I was doing, when she gently said, “Sounds like your last two jobs.”
I realized then and there that the only thing all these nasty, toxic environments had in common was me. I was the connecting thread to all of these mishaps in the workplace. I took mental stock and realized I am accountable for everything in my life. All of these patterns that kept surfacing were a common thread of my life, not theirs. I asked myself, “What have I been doing to create this reality?” Quite simply, I hadn’t been getting on the court or playing a starring role in my own blockbuster. I had been letting life happen to me vs., co-creating with life and being accountable for my own actions and patterns. These patterns were really an inner cry for help. I kept living the same reality of moving between jobs, states and countries to get away and start fresh. But I wasn’t able to look at the big picture. No matter where I went, these patterns would keep recurring until I learned to recognize each situation as an opportunity to learn something new. Each new job was a lesson. And the lesson would keep coming up until I recognized it and greeted it full-heartedly.
Is there a situation in your life that is causing you frustration? Challenge yourself to look at the situation with fresh eyes and ask yourself, “What is this situation trying to teach me? What can I learn from this?” By opening your mind up to the potential of new possibilities, life can reward us in ways we never expected.
Shannon Kaiser is an inspirational travel writer, author, adventure junkie and art director. Shannon is founder of playwiththeworld.com, an adventure site dedicated to helping others love life fully. Connect with her there.
Today, Jonathan Fields shares an excerpt from his book, “Uncertainty: Turning Fear & Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance.” Check out his video – it gave me chills! xo Kris
If you talk to most traditional artists and entrepreneurs, and they’re being honest, many will share their own variation of [Pearl S.] Buck’s…compulsion [to create] that, in many of its traits, seems to rise to the level of addiction, in part because they love what they do so much they start to feel empty when they’re not doing it. Others, who are very driven to get “there” and who know that getting there almost always takes a long, intense effort calculate that the more they work, the faster they’ll get to a place of mastery, genius, respect.
There is some truth to this. But there’s also a very dark underbelly. The lure of creative-obsessive behavior pulls you toward a single vehicle of creative output but ends up pushing you away from everything and everyone else in your life. Connections you once had to people and activities, even those you claim are the most important things in your universe, wither and eventually die of neglect. Stepping out of your something-from-nothing bubble turns into pain, so you stay in, where you know your trusted muse will always arrive at some point to offer up the next hit. It becomes a “chicken and egg” thing fairly quickly.
Was it the bad relationship that pushed you to invest all your energy in your next company or book? Or did the fact that you committed every ounce of psychic juice to your endeavor destroy your relationship with the “outside world” in the first place? It doesn’t really matter.
Either way, the cycle may yield great art or great business, but a great life?
Doubtful.
I’ve dealt with this very tension many times in my own creative life. Each pursuit begs to become all-consuming. It teases you, then wraps its arm around you and lures you in. It’s an amazing place to be, living on the marrow of conception and evolution. The world outside, a ghost of normalcy, can be easily forgotten.
That place where you live and breathe conception and evolution, it’s been claimed, must exist. It’s where great work comes from, where businesses are birthed, legends are made, and art comes to life. To visit this place and then return is necessary. But to believe that this place is a sustainable path to creation or to life is delusional. Trying to stay on that path for an extended period of time always ends in disaster.
Not just because your relationships implode. They do. Not just because your body, your health, and your ability to check back into reality abandon you. They do. Not just because the demise of your outer world brings sadness, which is sand in the gears of productivity. It does.
Most of all, it’s because you cannot sustain the level of conception and execution required to mount a breathtaking, lifetime-worthy body of work when all you do it work.
With rare exceptions, great creations—from paintings to companies to products to movies, songs, and books—don’t come from life in a vacuum. One of the reasons [famed story guru, Robert] McKee says great storytellers often don’t hit their stride until later in life is because they have to have spent a massive number of hours mastering the craft; they also need to have lived enough outside the pursuit of their craft to have something worth saying….
It’s the same with any endeavor, any quest to create something brilliant from nothing. It takes years to master a craft, from building a business to writing music. But craft alone doesn’t get you there.
Genius requires craft plus insight.
Insight rarely comes while you are constrained to the work and only the work. Indeed, it most often comes when you step away from your work, when you spend time with others in seemingly unrelated worlds. When you sit, walk, and breathe into stillness When you meditate. Talk. Listen. Love. Live. Be.
Counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s the undoing that plants the seeds of the greatest doing.
What I create in any one medium is made far richer by the fact that I spend considerable time outside that medium. It may mean my path to mastery takes longer. So be it. In the end, I create better businesses because I write. I write better books, essays, and posts because I relish my time as a dad, son, brother, husband, friend, yogi, student, and teacher.
Excerpted from “Uncertainty” by Jonathan Fields by arrangement with Portfolio Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) 2011 by Jonathan Fields.
It will happen later. His best friend will ask you out instead. You’ll be kissed in the movies instead of on a beach. You’ll end up going to a different school because the one you thought you’d get into didn’t work out.
She’ll move away. Someone else will move in next door. She’ll be a little weird at first, a little more shy, but ultimately really good at riding bikes and playing dolls.
That part you always wanted will go to that other girl instead. And you’ll rock it out in the chorus like your life depended on it. Because on some level it does.
The road you were going to take will be flooded and closed. The inn where you were going to stay will be under renovations. He’ll be taller than you thought. And have a funny accent. But will be a good kisser nonetheless.
You’ll get a flat tire on the way to that crucial meeting and end up peeing your pants laughing with the gas station attendant over a copy of Us Magazine. And someone else will fill in for you because they always do.
You won’t get that dream job like you thought you would. It will go to someone else with far less creative drive and vision than you. Someone far better suited for a cubicle than you.
You’ll be put in groups with people who put your panties in a wrinkle. You’ll sit next to someone on the plane who you’d never talk to except that they won’t shut up … and you’ll end up staying in touch for years and taking family vacations together.
Five years after you graduate, life won’t look anything like you would have imagined. You’ll be single when you thought you’d be married. You’ll have kids when you thought you’d be in the Peace Corps. That trip to Laos will get delayed because you’ve got to stay home and take care of your grandmother. Laos will be there. You’re grandmother won’t always.
He’ll move overseas and oddly the Atlantic Ocean between you will bring you closer than you ever dreamed possible. You won’t get engaged, married, or pregnant when you thought. You’ll miss the bus/train/plane/ferry that you thought you just HAD to be on.
You’ll fall off the turnip truck. You’ll jump on a different bandwagon than you intended. You’ll get fired when you thought you ought to be getting hired.
You’ll realize you forgot the outfit you had planned to wear and that the shoes are all wrong now that you have a full-length mirror to see the whole outfit. Your shirt will be wrinkled and you’ll spill red wine on your white jeans.
Your dog will eat your five-year plan. You’ll drop your Blackberry in the toilet (at least once). Your computer will crash, and you’ll delete the first draft of your magnum opus. You’ll accidentally delete your hard drive and end up with a clean slate.
You’ll show up late to the date with the guy you were sure was going to fit into your husband suit and realize he’s less than graceful under stress and not so flexible (better to know now than later).
When you thought you’d be baking pies and living behind your very own white picket fence you’ll find yourself doing something so entirely different you couldn’t have even imagined it a year before. There will be moments when you’ll look around and not even recognize your own life … in a good way.
You’ll take a wrong turn and end up in an entirely different city than you intended. You’ll dial the wrong number and end up in love with an entirely different person than you intended.
You’ll flunk out and end up taking five years instead of four to graduate. You’ll have your heart broken when you were sure you were with the one and then meet the other one a month later. You’ll move to a new city to start a new business with those perfect new business partners and then it will all go to shit. And you’ll move across the country again only to realize that that’s where you belonged the whole time.
You’ll drive as far away from home as possible thinking that it will make you feel free. Then you’ll get homesick and drive back four months later because you suddenly feel trapped.
You’ll imagine the open road, country music playing loud, you singing at the top of your lungs and flirting with a new man in every town. And then you’ll invite someone to come with you on a whim and realize driving around the country by yourself was a terrible idea anyway … and that it’s way more fun when you’re traveling with someone you love.
You won’t do it at the right time.
You’ll be late.
You’ll be early.
You’ll get re-routed.
You’ll get delayed.
You’ll change your mind.
You’ll change your heart.
It’s not going to turn out the way you thought it would.
It will be better.
Earlier this year Kate traveled 19,000 miles by car and 11,000 miles by plane (plus 300 miles by boat) on her Freedom Tour. Follow her adventures today as she embarks on The Freedom Tour 2.0 by visiting: http://katemoller.com.
Today I pulled back the mulch in my garlic bed. I was greeted by tender green shoots, holding aloft the fulfillment of a promise.
In October, I planted about 120 garlic cloves and let them sprout. Shortly before the first frost, I gave them a good blanket of straw, and we agreed to meet again after winter. I also put on a few extra layers, and now here we are, at the threshold of spring. The garlic, I must say, has a serious case of bed-head. As for me, well, I’m sufficiently groomed for gardening, I suppose.
It’s the same routine every year, this seed-to-plant-to-harvest-to-seed cycle. And it is still miraculous – because try as we might, we still don’t understand what created the spark of life that permeates our world. So I stand amazed as the plants awaken from their nap and demand my interaction.
It’s not just Nature performing this stage show, but also her sister Metaphor. Hand in hand, they remind us that winter’s spells are temporary. Dormancy is only a phase. Darkness is never eternal. Every yin has its yang, and life has its flow. Out of every cold and somber period, I also have sprung forth with renewed vigor and purpose.
I embrace all the seasons, and marvel at the unfair share of complaints filed against winter. Yes, it is cold. But it also can be a very productive time. In winter, we gather compact energy and have an opportunity to turn our attention inward. We conserve our resources. We have time to experience great peace in meditation. While these activities can be restful, they are a far cry from dormancy.
If we get a bit down, we have a promise to help us keep going. That promise is simple: The garden bed, once overflowing with autumn’s bounty, will spring into life again.
This promise is held in the tiniest of places, packed tightly into the seeds the garden gives us to save. Not only are the seeds tiny, but they are super-abundant, uncountable, even unmanageable. We gather them and keep them safely through winter. By using only a fraction of them, we’ll have more results than we can imagine.
Do we doubt it now and then? Do we sometimes wonder if the process will break down at some point? Sure we do. But behind it all, those seeds are lying in wait, as if they are secrets hidden by winter’s dim light. Then comes that mysterious and galvanizing spark …
So now the march toward aphelion awakens us, and we relive the unrestrained renewal of all living things. Energy breaks loose all around us. Spring blossoms peek in the windows as fresh tendrils turn the doorknob.
The newness in the air fills our lungs and reminds us that we can do anything. It’s time to grab a handful of seeds and step outdoors. Life demands our interaction.
