Do you ever wonder what makes life work? Like, what makes everything just click and seem right on time, right on the mark? With you, feeling good...maybe even feeling really good!??
It may not be the mystery we sometimes make it out to be. What if it was all based on our attitude, and what if our attitude was constantly open for tweaking, for adjusting? What if what we call “reality” was a constantly morphing phenomenon? And guess who’s got the remote in their hands?? You guessed it...each of us, me, and you. We can change the channel, and it can be as easy as pushing the button.
No, I haven’t always experienced this as true, and sometimes still, I feel a bit trapped in my own skin, trapped in a feeling of heaviness, or fear, or sadness, or self-doubt. But you know, I’m getting better and better at realizing that my mood IS in my control.
There’s a line from an old best-selling pop hit, “It’s my party, and I'll cry if I want to”. And lots of times in my life, I’ve felt that it’s good to own my own sadness, and let it rip. But when it hamstrings me in having the life I really want to have, I realize I don’t want to feel like I’m at the mercy of feelings that seem to be overwhelming me. After all, it’s a party for God’s sake, if you go along with the song title analogy anyway.
My life has been quite a “never-ending journey” of learning how to give myself a break. I mean, who really makes it hard on me? Who really? I am so much the only one in my head, in control, in the driver's seat. That has been such a huge and on-going revelation for me. No one else can ever encroach even a fraction of an inch into my head-space (unless of course I imagine I’ve let them in.) But are they really there? No, it’s always me, here alone with me, telling myself things, all day long.
So what if I took more control of what I tell myself? What if I listened more to what I AM telling myself, just noticing for a while what I hear myself saying, what I see myself imagining in pictures. What I’ve come to see so much lately is how much of my life I haven’t really been a true observer of all this inner dialogue and pictures and movies. And the crazy thing is, this stuff is what’s determining my moment-to-moment experience of life! You may have heard the old saying: “As a man thinks, so he is”. Well, yeah, how true it is!
What if we accepted that we are the combined writer, producer, director and actor in our very own movie, called our One Precious Life, (this one anyway, whether there are other lives we’ve lived or will yet live)? I mean, isn’t that cool?!!
So many of us just love to spend so much time in our lives watching movies and maybe even TV, and it has struck me so poignantly for so many years now, just how ironic it seems that we watch these amazing actors act out these amazing stories and dramas and comedies and it’s all so absorbing and engaging, yet do most of us live lives that we find as wonderful, or interesting, or as funny, or as tragic as what we see on the screen? Maybe some of us do, and maybe some of us don’t.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to live out most of the tragedies I see in movies or on TV, or so I think, but the rest of it can be pretty interesting or exciting or at the least, often “bigger than life”, that is, perhaps grander and more spellbinding than the life I’m living day in and day out. And, I suppose, the on-screen tragedies may serve many useful functions of touching our hearts in ways they often need to be touched. So many people point out that “without the darkness and the pain, how would we be able to so profoundly appreciate the light and the happiness?”
Still, the contrast that is definitely the stuff of dramas and tragedies has always been something I wanted to be taught GENTLY by. Devastation does happen, or rather, we attract it into our lives sometimes, but if I can learn my awesome life lessons through kindness, ease and compassion, I choose that method. I think lately our modern society has gotten a bit addicted to tragedy and drama as a principal default assumption of “just how it is” that many of us subscribe to.
But my point is, what if you were told you were the complete team needed to create your own unique and extremely good movie, called “My Life”, or whatever much better title you might be inspired to name it? Are you up for it??
