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Choose the things that delight you.
Why not? You make your future in the present. The more delight you can infuse into the present, the more delightful your future will be.
Who knows what the future will bring? Trying to make decisions based on what might happen is futile and frustrating. You can only decide in the present, using the information you have right now.
Don’t be afraid of making the Wrong Choice. If you don’t like your decision, there’s not much that can’t be changed. The closer you are to the real truth of what your needs are, today, the better the odds you’ll have of success in your decision. If you chose for your delight, you’ll be choosing well.
You don’t even have to consider your loved ones. What children (or anyone else for that matter) may need can be dealt with in the planning stages. Others will handle any changes you make. Life is change and everyone around you is subject to the shifting of life. After all, your delightful decision is likely to be better than deception and depression. The decision needs only to be based on your needs right now. What delights you today. What’s truly best for you is best for everyone around you.
Confused about what is best for you? Follow your delightful feelings. It is just that simple: Go for what delights you.
Plans change more often than they play out. Life is like that. The weather reflects this. It’s hard to predict which way the wind will blow. You don’t always know how the atmospheric conditions will change. Here’s another one of those simple phrases to practice with.
If you throw up your hands and ask, “Now, what?” with a pleading in your voice, you’re not really looking for an answer. But when you ask it with curiosity, “Now, what?” it becomes a powerful quest.
The act of asking it grounds you in the present moment. To ask this question, you must first accept what is happening. It comes out of a clear view of how things are now.
This is the Art of Rolling with it. When you roll with it, you welcome whatever’s at your door. You embrace it and let it show you where to go.
Now, what? What are you going to do with the current situation? What are you going to do about what you wanted to do? I find it’s helpful to answer those questions. If I must do something else right away, I don’t want to forget what gets shoved aside. I like to reschedule it as soon as possible. Get it replanted so I can be sure it will get done.
When things change, take a breath and ask, “Now, with this new situation, what am I going to do, what do I want to feel?”
As the wind will change a beautiful day, it can change the direction of my day, my week, my hour, my years. I wish to remain open and bend in the wind without it breaking me.
I understand the concept. It’s about energy and vibration. If I’m vibrating with love now, I will attract similar vibrations. If I’m picking at things I don’t care for in my current situation, I’m likely to keep finding things wrong in the next situation. If I don’t harmonize or vibrate the way I want to feel, I’ll never make it to “there.” I need to accept the now with the same feeling I would accept what I want.
But, I’ve been wrestling with this for days. I get caught up in thinking that if I love that which I do not choose, it will become my Then. Doesn’t that kinda figure? It feels wrong (or odd) to say I love this the way it is, if I don’t. I’m frankly nervous about giving my thumbs up, if you will, to things I really choose to change. There is no use telling me that things change because sometimes it feels like they don’t. It sure looks like I’m stuck in the same stuff I’ve been trying to change.
Okay, I know that life is always changing – even if it’s not the way I imagine. I guess what this concept teaches is that it’s about feeling good no matter what and then things will change to meet the new vibration. But how does that work, anyway? Do those good feelings and vibrations transform my life into what I want? How does life know how to change? From my Want? Vision? The Intention? The good vibes? What’s to keep life from staying the same since I seem to be so happy with the way things are now?
Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to wedge good feeling into things that don’t naturally generate them. I know what feels good and this is not it! Maybe I’m straddling the two. Thinking I can somehow lasso the life I have to the life I want. If I pull hard enough they will come together. They have to become one, eventually, don’t they?
Do I need to look at what I Do Not Choose more carefully so I can figure out how to change it? But that leads me to ask,: Why isn’t this change working? What am I doing wrong? No, thank you. That feels like a closed valve, keeping good things from coming my way.
The Positive Slant says, why not? Doesn’t it feel better to love my now AND my then? The Secret, of course, is to love what you have.
Could I live without an intention or a goal, though? Seems hard to me. As Paulette Terrels has said, What if your Purpose is Peace? Or Love? Or even Joy? Rather that this or that _____.
The things I love in my current life don’t have to have anything to do with what I may not “prefer at the moment.” I can base my Joy on Whatever Happens or on things that are connected to the situation only by their flavor – like joy or peace.
A practice might be to find those things that feel good which are not directly connected to the life situation or the thing I do not choose. Not entangling myself in what I do and do not want. Like finding some middle ground between the two. A bridge which could connect them. What are some things I Love about now? Being able to help others. Taking a walk on a beautiful fall day. Thoughts about my future. A drink of cool fresh water. Having time to express my art. Being with people I love. Taking good care of myself. Doing something special for me or my loved ones.
The trick, according to”Conversations with God,” is . . . To choose something while not condemning, but loving too, that which you do not choose. For one thing, this thing I do not choose is what brought me here – closer to that which I Do Want.
The key then is to love whatever is happening, holding my intention lightly. After all, loving life every moment does not lock an otherwise not wanted situation in place. The more I can love whatever is in front of me, the more of that same feeling I’ll get.
In the end, it must be about getting past Do and Do Not Want – into Acceptance of whatever is there. It’s all a Joy, all a ride.
I’d like to first, take the time to thank my readers. Especially those of you who have subscribed and get regular deliveries of my words. It means so much to me there are souls out there listening. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
In posting on the first module of the book that never was, I have seen it more clearly. If you will allow a bit of a repeat, I’d like to share my renewed thoughts.
This first class in the Smart Module, “The Cosmology of the Universe,” will take the reader into the planetarium to see how the Universe works.
Section one is “Getting to Know the Loving Universe.” I now believe this is the most important piece. The place to start is with an overview of the ways this Universe is here for us, working on our behalf. On Twitter, recently, Neale Donald Walsch said, “There is nothing that happens in life that is not for our benefit, nor can there be, for it would not be happening.” This section tells of how we come equipped with everything we need, such as curiosity, courage, and imagination.. We find that we are loved constantly and unconditionally. All we have to do to prove it is look for it.
From there we go to “Tuning into the Twin Constellations of Acceptance and Allowance.” These powerful twins offer the portal to making our life work. When we understand how life moves through acceptance and allowance, we see it is the only sane way to live. If it’s happening, there really is nothing else worth doing than accepting what’s going on. Knowing that it is a Loving Universe helps us to rest into allowing life. Together, Acceptance and Allowance open us to possibilities.
In “Discovering the Vastness of the Now,” the true powers of Acceptance and Allowance come into play. They take us to where everything’s happening. All things happen in the now. It’s where all the knowledge, wisdom and awareness that we will ever need resides.
The Vastness of the Now (from the book that never was)
The Universe is what holds us all together, makes us one. The Universe is composed of everything, all of us. We are one with the Universe. The Universe is so big, now must be our frame of reference. Something we all share.
What’s already happened is past, what will happen is dependent on what is done now. As Dan Fogelberg said, “We are fettered to the future, we are prisoners of the past.” But all we really have is now. Trying to live anywhere else is like straddling a wide stretch of water. You’ll either be jumping back and forth or spend your whole life immobile.
In order to fully accept and allow, you must be in the now to see what it is you’re accepting. Anything else is insanity. It’s all happening now. You cannot say you accept something if you don’t know what it is. And trying to pin down the past or the future is nothing more than futile. There is nothing else but the now.
All the power is stored right here in the present moment. Anything you want to do starts right here, right now. It would be nice if you could skip to the future and have what you wish. Or sit down and wait for it to come. But that’s not how the Universe works. It’s all about energy. And the secret to using energy is to know that it all starts now.
All the answers you seek are here, now. You won’t find them scraping around in the past because that’s done. You won’t find answers in the future, either, because you just can’t get there. Most of us do not have the ability to see clearly into the future.
So, if we wish to live sanely, we must fully inhabit the now.
For something so hard to hold, Time certainly is powerful!
I’ve been reading “The Power of Now” again. Eckhart Tolle has much to say on the subject of Time and I’m still early in the book. He talks of how we get caught up in psychological time. Though we might have to live within “clock” time, we take it way too far.
Time claws at me from behind, reminding me of all the time I’ve wasted. And it cackles from the future, taunting me to move faster. Time is always there to demand I go there, or do this. What exactly am I doing with my time? I would venture to say Time is at the heart of most stress. It’s so hard to make it do what you want.
So, how do we step aside and let time tick by without being so attached to it?
Perhaps, like most things, it‘s about controlling the thoughts. It’s not really time’s fault, after all. You can’t blame the clock. The time is what we’ve decided it is: 2:47 pm, Eastern Standard Time. But it’s all the thoughts that gather around it which cause such stress and angst. The judgments that can spew forth!
I wonder if I can practice releasing the thoughts, the stress, the anxiety about time? At the moment it’s literally hours before I have to note the time. Can’t I just let go and be in the now? At least for the next few hours?
It feels almost impossible to escape it. I have had fantasies about going to sleep when I’m tired, getting up when I’m rested, eating when I feel hungry. Instead of being such a slave to the clock. Even at times in my life when I could do that (with no particular place to go and no particular time to be there) I still couldn’t do it. I can’t even do the “it’s 5:00 somewhere” game. I’m just so locked into the structure of time (except for a fondness for having breakfast for dinner).
I know well the value and peace, as well as all that can be done in the now. That means gaining control over my addiction to psychological time.
Stay tuned ~
I was planning to write about the sanity of being in the now. But, my computer came down with a virus and must be shipped off with all my precious documents to, if all goes well, be restored to me. But there are no guarantees. All my hard work, important documents tucked away in folders, special things I’ve saved. . . who knows if I’ll ever see them again? All I can do is wait and practice letting go.
I see, though, that this is very much a now issue. I need to focus on what’s right here, right now. And all is well. I have email, a place to write, Pandora is singing to me and I don’t, at the moment, have need for anything else.
If I’m not caught up in the memory of all that I can’t get to right now, or anticipating what I will need, eventually, I can maintain a sense of equilibrium. Later, if I find a need for something, I’ll either have it or I won’t.
There really is no middle ground here, no waffling whether I will or I won’t let go. This is the reality of the now moment: My blood is pumping, I’m breathing, life goes on.
Letting go not only comes in handy with events like this, it’s also quite good in defeating the aftermath in the need to be right. I play games in my head: I am convinced I’m right that this sucks, my life, as I knew it, is over without these files, I have to start over again on everything, this kind of thing always happens to me, I deserve something like a cookie to soothe my frayed nerves. But I can let go of all that. It isn’t necessarily right anyway. I certainly am in no position to predict what the future will bring. So I can let go of being right about this situation, right now.
There really isn’t anything but now. When and if I reach that point of having lost all my files, it will be in the now, then. But this now includes none of that forever stuff. If, in the future, I don’t get my files back, I can make a decision in that now moment to let go, because there really won’t be any other choice.
To think there is anything but now is futile. As futile as wishing my files back if they’re gone. It’s true I could fuss about it, cry a lot, get angry, but none of that would do me any good. It would be a fact of my life, just like the present moment is a fact. The moment you start to say it’s otherwise, you’re into the next now moment. There is no one I know who has mastered the art of being anywhere but now.
Right now, I will let go of worry about my files and rest into the present. Let go of being right about this whole mess and just be in what is happening in my life at this moment of now.
The Positive Slant On the Path 