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Look for the good stuff
I’ve heard it expressed in different ways: Beliefs create reality. What you think is what you get. Careful what you wish for; you’ll probably get it.
Psychologists call it selective perception. We see what we expect to see because that’s how our brains process the streams of data gushing through our life at any given moment.
The quality of our life comes down to how we focus our attention. Isn’t that an amazing idea?
Our happiness or sadness or fright is largely determined by how and upon what we focus our attention. Your brain is like an auto-focus camera that is constantly looking to bring you clarity, but it’s you who is holding and pointing the camera.
Love letters happen on the inside first
All the world is a mirror for me. Whatever I see and react to mirrors something in my internal universe.
When I respond positively to something, I am seeing something that stimulates my internal universe in a positive way.
When I respond negatively to something, I am seeing something that does not fit into how I think the universe should be.
Despite the fact that I can make split-second decisions on what I like or dislike, it’s actually an amazingly complex procedure to describe.
For example, what do you think of Tiger Woods? Bill Clinton? George Bush? Sarah Palin? No matter where you go in your thoughts with any of these people, you’re making all your judgments based on your internal universe and the data you have fed into it. Unless you know these people personally and intimately, you are getting all your data through filtered, mostly opinionated sources. You may make snap judgments on them without even thinking. It doesn’t matter whether they are heroic or demonic to you.
Not all gifts are obvious at first sight
Much of human existence is all about wanting things. Some of the things we want are material. Some of the things we want are mental, emotional, or spiritual.
Over the course of my life, I have gotten many of the things that I wanted. I have also not gotten many of the things that I wanted. When I start to compare the two experiences, that of getting versus not getting, I can see interesting dynamics at play. I have learned from these.
Especially when I got older and could see life through a lens of a longer perspective, I saw that some of the things I really, really wanted at one time ended up to have little to no meaning in the end. Very intriguing how that works. Ultimately I expended vast amounts of energy in the pain of not having something or someone in my life that I really wanted.
Celebrate Your Life Now Day
While driving around West Salem a few months ago, I pulled into a bank parking lot, heading for a routine cash withdrawal from the money-spewing machine. In the middle of the lot between the ATM and me rested a patrol car, a police officer, and a dead man not walking.
Not a violent death, I was told moments later by a bank teller at the drive-up window. The fellow underneath the yellow tarp had suffered a massive coronary.
I am not accustomed to seeing real-life, end-of-the-line scenes like this, so the emotional impact jarred me. One thought wrestled from my freshly scrambled brain was this ponderous question: what would it be like for me to drop dead right now?
"Dad, did you know that you're dead?"
Is there some unwritten law that prohibits characters in woo-woo movies and novels from being inquisitive about their paranormal encounters? Do they always have to be so thick-headed in the face of revolutionary changes to their reality?
If I saw Shoeless Joe Jackson standing on a baseball field that I made out of a cornfield after a voice told me if I build it he will come, I’d have a few questions. I’d show a little spunk. I wouldn’t just leave it at, “Oh, there’s Shoeless Joe Jackson. Hi there.”
Don’t get me wrong. Field of Dreams is one of my favorite movies. That’s largely because it whets my appetite for more answers about why we’re here on this planet.
The gods may be lovers
The classic way for a civilization from outer space to conquer Planet Earth, as we’ve seen in countless movies and TV shows, is to use some ultra-modern form of Earthling-style barbarism. You know, shock and awe us with their ray guns of mass destruction. Blow us up real good.
I see that as same ol’ Earthling mentality dressed up in a different space suit. That was probably my biggest complaint with Star Trek. Technology had advanced at warp speed but humans and all those bad other beings had the same duke-it-out fight mentality we saw in Bonanza.
Why don’t we start thinking out of Idea Jail on this? Let’s conceive of a highly advanced race as perhaps having changed the game plan on visitations. Maybe they conquer (if you want to use that word) via pleasure principles.
Simple pleasures don't cost a paycheck
Over much of my life, my lifestyle has been material moderation. I’ve lived in nice but modest houses, driven nice but modest cars, and enjoyed comfortable but reasonably priced living.
Some of the time that was based on a deliberate choice that the high-paying staff writing jobs I had were great for producing income but bad for spiritual morale. I loved the money, but I dreaded going to work because I did not have any emotional involvement with the words i was writing. It was just a job.
Some of the time it was the economy, usually after just being laid off or trying to find work when there were few good jobs around. I found myself earning just enough money to get by, but not enough to splurge on a bunch of extras.
I generally found that much of the time when I was in the worst shape financially, I was not in the worst shape emotionally. In fact, some of those periods were more exciting and fulfilling than when the money flowed copiously.
My first writing machine wasn't a Mac
My winter project this year is to sort through bunches of old files that I have packed around with me and moved from place to place to place for decades. That includes various file drawers full of writing projects, correspondence, and research material, along with a few gigabytes of electronic files stored since the 80s when I became an early-bird personal computer user.
It’s sort of the ultimate treasure hunt through my life. A life review in words. A mirror-image of where I have been.
I spent the last week at the start of my hunt by gathering together a huge amount of paper and putting it through the first sort. Much of my early writing was created on electric typewriters with no digital backup. After gathering I jettisoned the first pile of stuff that I clearly had no interest in saving. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a very small pile. There was a lot I wanted to pick through sheet by sheet.
Enlighten yourself with your camera
Here is a fun way to amuse yourself during the holiday season. Get your digital camera out and go play in the dark with the pretty lights. I call these exposures light paintings because I’m making art with lights.
The procedure is pretty simple. At night, point your camera at some brightly colored holiday lights. The new vivid LED lights are particularly good for this. Press the shutter, and while the picture is exposing, move the camera around. Pan it, tilt it, even wiggle and jiggle it. This action will blur and streak the lights.
You can of course experiment with different camera settings, but I find the ubiquitous program mode to be just fine. It’s pretty hard to predict what you’ll get, so take lots of photos and try lots of camera movement techniques. Even if you can see the results on your camera’s LCD, you won’t really know the full extent of what you got until you download the photos to your computer. So keep snapping!
Creativity on
One of the issues with getting too creative in your thinking is that few people understand you anymore. If the whole point of creativity is to look at what everyone else looks at and to see something new and different, the problem is that you see what most of them don’t see. Frequently it is something they do not want to see as well.
Of course, this is a plot in countless movies. Someone sees a ghost or an extraterrestrial visitor and then tries to prove to a skeptical world that he isn’t crazy. But then again, creativity is kind of a craziness by definition because you are seeing something others don’t see.
We like to be loved and accepted. We like to be popular. Many of us like to share and to feel understood. So being out of sync with the mainstream world is risky bidness.
Of course, I am not here to say that no one understands me. There are lots of empathizers around, just not that many in my immediate vicinity. I know you are out there; I just don’t know you yet.
