Prepare To Be Surprised

As we begin a new week, we look ahead with our plans, our vision, our desires, our dreams. All of us who are actively involved in our lives have events we are planning, people we want to get together with, things we want to do. Those who are bored with their own lives and have no vision for their own future, no desire to create new outcomes or opportunities will not sense this. Whether we are concerned with good or bad news, often we find that worrying about a development ahead of time simply increases stress. A good way around that is to prepare for surprises. What if we simply approached our week with the idea that we have plans, and we simply are moving forward with them, but the actual outcome of our plans may be a surprise.

Simply prepare your self to accept whatever surprises life brings us this week. Just trust that whatever way it works out is for the best.

Yes, we do plan ahead, but we cannot always control outcomes. Once again, it all comes back to staying in the moment. Make this moment the best you can make it, and the next and the next, and eventually you get to whatever comes later. If you take each moment as it comes, that leaves the event you are anticipating as simply the next moment. By delighting in whatever pleasure the present moment brings, we disarm the anxiety of anticipation and allow ourselves the joy of life that comes with surprises.

An Abundant World

We live in an abundant world. Just this week, I got a notice from someone that there is a huge yard sale going on by the owners of a storage facility. You know, those places where people rent little garages to store their stuff. Apparently, a lot of people abandoned them and there is all this stuff that the owners want to get rid of. So if a person needs some household goods for instance, there is all this stuff on sale for the lowest prices imaginable. Apparently lots of people bought stuff that they really wanted, and after a time, they decided they didn't want it. Tastes change. Priorities change. On any given weekend, yard sales and garage sales, or websites like freecycle offer all kind of useful things. All that stuff that we felt like we couldn't live without, suddenly we are living without. And now it is available for someone else's use.

Yet, some people only want to buy furniture and household stuff new from the store, and so they might feel like there is not enough in the world because they would need lots of money or lots of credit to get all of these things.

The world is abundant in other ways as well. If we are only looking for career openings or jobs like the ones we used to have, in many cases, they are not available to us. However, if we expand our scope of thinking and enlarge our vision, there may be other openings that did not even occur to us before. Making a living may look very different now than it did before. We all have opinions about what is good and what is bad about all this, but more importantly, we have to look at the different ways there are for us to get what we need. We have to be more creative about finding solutions.

I find that many people hold or have held self limiting ideas about partners, lovers, companions. Many people have interpreted the term soulmate to mean that there is only one person in this world who would be a perfect partner for them, and they are on the hunt for that perfect person. It's a lot of work finding that needle in the haystack.

But if a person were to allow the possibility that there are many people in this world who could be excellent partners for them, they would not find themselves in the position of searching for a needle in a haystack. Let the definitions be a little more flexible, and do the things that you really want to do, and you will find any number of other people who are quite satisfying to be with, any number that might become close and who could share intimacies with, people who could be wonderful companions and lovers. There is no shortage of people in this world. We only create shortages by the way we define them.

We do live in an abundant world. Whatever we need is here somewhere. If we approach it with our eyes open in this way, instead of a world of lack and shortage, we will see a world of possibility and plenty.

If not now, when?

If not you, who? If not here, where? If not now, when?

I am not certain who first came up with that, but it is powerful, inspirational, and can apply to each one of us in our own way.

How many times have we had things on our "to do" list that we never get around to? Near where I live there are a few funeral homes that I pass every day, and that prompts the question. If you are of a mature age and you have not yet done things that you say you really want to do, when will you?

Our priorities do change in the course of a lifetime. They can change within the course of a year, or a day. What should we go for? What should we forget about? What should come on or go off our list?

So if we were to prompt ourselves with these few powerful questions, how would we answer?

Friday, Freya's Day

We got our names of the days of the week from the Norse Germanic pagans. Friday to them was Freya's Day. Freya was the goddess of fertility, sexuality, magic and divination. She was also the leader of the Valkyries, who would bring the dead to the feasting halls of the afterlife.

Interesting how all these many centuries later, Friday still maintains its place a one of the big date nights, where all kinds of sexual play and magic are in most people's plans for the evening.

Whatever we do on Friday night is a kickoff to the weekend, and certainly fitting in terms of Freya's spirit.

Tonight, raise a toast to the goddess who created the spirit of Friday nights! Let magic flavor whatever you do, with whoever you do it. Happy Friday!

A Word About Words

I have heard from more than one person about how they hated their job and wanted to get out. Well, the universe heard their desires and granted their wishes. They were suddenly informed that the company was letting them go.

The problem is that they forgot to mention that they didn't want to simply be suddenly unemployed and without an income, they wanted to find work doing something they love and obtain their income from that.

Forgetting important words is what gets us in a bind. Better that a person in a similar situation would phrase it that they see themselves doing work that they love and being well paid for it, and finding an opportunity to do so, which would then open the way for them to leave the old job that they don't like in order to devote their energy to something they enjoy.

The people in the example above did get what they asked for. But they omitted an important part of the request. Be careful what you wish for, and be careful how you word it.

Riding on Nightmares

Nightmares often arise from the conscious changes in a person's life which may be traumatic, or upsetting. When we lay down to sleep for the night, negative, fearful dreams that may cause us distress enough to wake up and not get a sound night's sleep can be used as a powerful vehicle to turn those fears around.

One way to do this is to write the nightmare down, then change the course of the story to be an outcome you find desirable. Use these as a guided meditation for three days and you can see the nightmare turn into a journey of power, passion and strength.

By giving yourself another way to view the progress of events, you can reprogram your mind to visualize a positive outcome. It is natural that nightmares come when we are making a difficult transition in life.

Nightmares can present us a gift if we look at our greatests fear, face it and see ourselves facing this fear and achieving a positive outcome. Often times we do not know our real strength and the extent of our resources and abilities until we are challenged.

Remember, courage comes from the heart. Anyone can do well when everything is easy and things are just coasting along. It takes a person with a lot of heart to rise to meet challenges and overcome adversity. It takes keen powers of observation to note where there is an opportunity to turn a difficulty to our advantage and then act on it.

Learn to ride the nightmares. Change the story of the nightmare so that it plays out in a way that is powerful for you. There is power in nightmares. Use it to your advantage.

How Normal is Normal?

What we all really want are relationships that work. How we define what works can vary greatly from the models that are held up as normal. There are all kinds of ways of making a relationship that works. Couples are creative in forging a partnership that works for them, although it varies from what is considered to be the norm. What's important is that it works for the couple.

Although the model that is still presented in our culture of a successful marriage, for example, is one where a couple gets married and stays married. But even the actors who play such roles in movies have each been married more than once.

In real life, we discover that some of our relatives had lovers other than their spouses, and that we have cousins or step siblings that we never knew we had. How many women either had abortions or went away and had their kids and then gave them up for adaption? We find out that grandma or grandpa had another marriage that they just never got around to mentioning because they didn't feel like talking about it. How many of our families had someone who was referred to as a "confirmed bachelor" or a "spinster" and how many of those people were really players, how many were really gay or lesbian, and how many were people who just didn't care about sex or relationships?

Each such discovery presents a vivid example of a relationship that varied from the standard that we were presented. When such instances are unearthed in the archeology of family history, the truth takes on a little different perspective.

One of the processes that changed during our lifetimes is that divorces became easier to obtain and so couples that really are not getting along well can change their legal status. In our parents and grandparents time, couples often stayed together for a variety of externally imposed reasons: to keep up appearances, because they feared that they could not do better, because they simply did not have the resources to move on, or because the divorce laws were so stringent that they felt that they really didn't have a choice, or because the social stigma attached to it was discouraging. Still, there are the stories of those who simply walked away from a bad situation and started over somewhere else.

So what are people doing differently now? For at least a few decades, retirees have declined to get married and simply live together because remarriage might result in forfitting pension or social security checks.

Some couples whose professions require lots of travel have maintained separate residences while continuing to have a relationship. Some couples have open relationships which are not exclusive.

Even the model that was held up to us as what was normal is now seen in a different light. With the divorce rate around 50%, even those who live together in exclusive relationships might be on their second or third marriages. And those who did marry only once and are still together many years later are very much in the minority. All of which raises the question of how normal is normal?

There are all kinds of ways for couples to make relationships work and they do not all look alike. In fact, there is a lot of variety in the ways they find to make it work.