This is the mantra I have been repeating to myself often lately. As someone who usually has a mild level of anxiety going on at most times, my mind races towards all the ways things can go wrong. I hope to succeed and win at whatever I am doing but I am also too familiar with the worst-case scenarios.
But recently, I’ve started to wonder, ‘what if I flipped it?’. I mean, my present thought patterns are really just that, a pattern. And patterns, I can change. We get addicted to thought forms and used to certain ways of observing or experiencing the world. But it takes just as much energy to think of positive outcomes as it does to think of negative ones, so why not let go of that pessimism and experiment more with optimism.
Even if the actual results don’t change, even if things don’t go our way, the very act of changing our expectations changes the texture of our lives and our experiences. Last week, I walked into the bank trying to get something sorted out, and as I sat in the consultant’s office, I felt the tension rise within me, my mind racing with disaster scenarios, not only would I not get the thing I wanted, but something even worse would happen. So, I took a deep breath and started to repeat to myself, ‘the world works for me, the world works for me’. I did not get what I wanted, but I left with the sense that the consultant was on my side, he genuinely wanted me to succeed. He even wished me good luck on my way out.
I try to live in an intuitive way, responding to and moving according to my heart, whatever I feel in my core to do. I won’t take a decision until I felt the answer had revealed itself to me, and I would follow whatever path I felt I needed to, to get there. It is sometimes frustrating to the people around me, but it is my process.
And lately, I’ve been feeling like…eh…like bleh.
After a long season of hustling, pushing and fighting and making things happen, it is kind of hard knowing what to do next or where to go next. What happens after you get what you want?
Sometimes it is nothing. You do nothing. You just wait it out.
And waiting is something we don’t understand too well as a culture. The periods of rest and inactivity are just as important as the periods of grinding and creation. Sometimes you just have to be still. It’s in that time that you recover, that you are strengthened. It is then your vision is restored, and the path opens up to the next things.
But you have to be open to it. You have to accept it all, understanding that the universe and life moves in ebbs and flows, in cycles. Sometimes things are great, sometimes things are not. Sometimes things are slow, sometimes they move with determined ferocity. It is not up to you to control it, but to surrender to it and flow with it.
For the world to work for you, you have to let go of ego. It is not about you, and about what you ‘want’. Although there is a space for that. It is more about ‘what is’. The universe is infinitely bigger than you and knows more than you. Where has it placed you in the larger scheme of things. Where does it want you to be? What does it want you to do?
It takes some time, practice and openness to be able to listen and discern the times. To see things happen and recognize how to respond. But once you understand this, life becomes a collaboration with source. Life brings things your way, and you are present enough to seize the opportunities, the open doors, the gaps in plain sight that you ought to slip into.
You join the eternal dance, having everything, and holding on to nothing, living, being, creating.
