We so very much want cause and effect to be linear and immediate and simple. Flora Bowley gets comments all the time how amazing it is that she’s become an instant success. Luckily she’s a good sport and laughs at the misunderstanding. She’s been working as an artist for over 18 years and it has taken many a side road, inspiration, desperate measure and willingness to try whatever is going to work in order to get her where she is today. Not to say it wasn’t and isn’t a wonderful ride, but it certainly wasn’t a short day trip with the top down.
Just because you have a goal, a plan, and the willingness to implement doesn’t mean that the road to your end point will be smooth nor does it mean you’ll actually get to that end goal. Life is an amazingly intricate tapestry woven in multiple dimensions filled with beings, all with free will, making choices in every second of every day. The complexity of causes and the multitude of effects that they engender boggles the mind. For some it is frightening and causes people to freeze and never want to do anything. For others like myself its energizing. I find it beautiful and awe inspiring and mesmerizing. I see the potential to be anything, do anything, create anything in all of that beingness that is going on out there.
Practically what that means is that we can’t know the details of how things are going to unfold until they start doing it. So while we can imagine a great deal, we can make the best laid plans, we can prepare for the known and possibly for some aspects of the unknown, what we call ‘mystery’, which is all the causes and effects out there interacting with us beyond our ability to comprehend the interconnection of it all, is working to bring us what we might possibly need or what might spur us to something new, some new aspect of our goal, our life, our beingness. Opportunities open up for us when we open up to opportunity. The thing is we can’t control which ones, what they look like, or when they appear. Our job is to communicate our goals and plans, to sort through opportunities, taking those that make sense, weeding out those that don’t, going in directions we never thought of before, sticking to those we know we need to go in, becoming part of the conversation that is the Universe around us. Because it is a conversation and we can choose to participate in it or we can use all of our energy to try to drown it out.
Getting from here to there is an adventure that we each make every day. We can do it with open eyes enjoying the adventure of how it unfolds or with our eyes shut tight and our fingers in our ears trying to ignore it and hope for the best. How will you step out into today?