Posts from — April 2009

Imagine if you had a garden that gave you all sorts of good things to eat.  You could grow zucchini, cucumbers, celery, lettuce, but for whatever reason, you couldn’t grow tomatoes.  Year after year, you try, you work hard at it but the result of your effort is always the same – little to no tomatoes.  Because you can perceive your garden from the rest of the world, at some point, you’d recognize that what’s lacking in your life – tomatoes – is not to be found in your garden.  You could continue to stubbornly work hard to grow tomatoes in your garden, or you could move on.

If you look around at the world, there are many things that are lacking for people.  For some, it’s adequate food and shelter.  For others, it’s peace and safety.  For others, it’s an overall experience of joy and fulfillment.  And yes, there are some, who don’t experience anything missing from their lives.  Mostly, we have just accepted this state of affairs – how it is – as a fact of life.  The result is we continue to work hard to combat the things we don’t like or search for the things that are missing from our lives.  Never does it seem to cross our minds that we are looking for these things in a garden where they just won’t grow.

Now this may seem rather cynical if you think that the garden I’m talking about is life itself.  Before we leap to the conclusion that life is the culprit, there’s another question to consider and that is, “What if it’s not life that is creating the experience we’re having, instead it’s our way of life?”  Here I’m not talking about the way of life in America or in China or in India.  I’m talking about all of it – a way of life on this planet.  If we can begin to recognize that there is a way of life – a holistic system – we’ve created that is giving us what we have, then we begin to ask questions like, “How do we design a new way of life to give us the things we are looking for?  How can we design a new garden to give us all the things we already have plus the thing we want – tomatoes?”  Or as I ask it in my book A Life Worth Living, “How do we design a way of life where good things happen naturally for people?”

We’ve spent our lives trying to get our “garden” to grow the things we want.  It’s time to at least consider the possibility that the way of life we’ve created is simply not designed to give us everything we want.  This doesn’t mean we have to trash what we have nor does it make how we’ve lived wrong.  There is no right or wrong in this question.  There never is in the realm of design.  There’s just “what is” – the results we have.  The question isn’t whether what we have is right or wrong; the question is whether what we have is what we want.

And if the challenge of inventing a new way of life seems daunting especially when you look out at all that we’ve already created in the world, just remember that creation begins in thought not in physical space.  The place where you need to make space for your creation is not out here in the world, it’s in your mind.  You don’t need to run off into the wilderness to find a new way of life.  You don’t need to spend your life convincing others to join you in your creation.  The light bulb existed in Edison’s mind before it ever existed in physical reality, and he created it without seeking permission or agreement from anyone else.  All you need to do is make space for a new question, a new inquiry, something like “How do we design a new way of life where good things happen naturally for people?”  

All you need to do to begin is to make space for a new conversation.

There’s nothing wrong with the question, “How?”  So it’s not that “How do I become more effective,” for example, is an inherently bad question.  It’s that we keep asking the question “How?” as if we don’t already know how to create what we want, but we do.  How do I know this?  We created what we’ve got.  And at one time, what we’ve got was what we wanted. 

Right now, your life is an outcome.  You have the job you have, the relationships you have, the amount of money you have, and so on.  But that’s not all there is to the outcome of your life, right?  There are also the unintended consequences of what you created.  You worked hard to get that promotion and now that you’re the boss, you’re forced to deal with issues that you didn’t bargain for and couldn’t have imagined.  Plus, with your new raise, you finally bought a house, but now you are stuck in that promotion you no longer want even though there’s another great opportunity out there but the salary for that opportunity won’t allow you to make the mortgage payment.  Consequence after consequence of the choices we make in our lives just seem to pile on, and our lives are spent in one form or another trying to survive those consequences.  We’re so quick to identify what’s wrong that needs fixing, but seem to become tongue-tied if someone looks us in the eye and asks, “What do you want?  What do you really want in your life?”

Why is that?  Here’s my answer: we’ve come to believe that we don’t know how to create what we want.  There’s this subtle conversation in the background of our minds humming along saying something like, “There must be something wrong with me.  If there weren’t something wrong with me, I wouldn’t have this life.  I should have known not to take this job or marry this person or buy this house or have kids.  I should have known, something is wrong with me, and I’m not to be trusted.”  So when that person looks us in the eye and asks us that dreaded question, “What do you really want?” it’s very likely that we don’t know because we’ve spent so much of our time and energy just trying to survive our lives with very little time devoted to really thinking about what we want.  Or we do know what we want, but are too afraid to say because after all, we’re not to be trusted with our lives. 

The thing we seem to forget is that we wanted the job, we wanted the house, and we wanted the relationship, AND we got those things.  We created those things in our lives.  Sure, we didn’t want the unintended consequences of what we’ve created, but rather than just create what we want from where we are; we beat ourselves up for not being able to predict the future.  Guess what?  There are almost always unintended consequences.  There’s always something that comes out of what we create that we weren’t anticipating and/or didn’t want. Instead of just including unintended consequences as part of the result – part of the creative process of life – we resist them.  We’ve made these consequences mean that we don’t know how to create, and so, we live stuck with what we don’t want; instead of joyously creating what’s next.  And if that doesn’t sound like much of a choice to you, if the thought of creating what’s next for you seems more a burden than a joy, then all that means is you’re experiencing the impact of the cultural story we’ve inherited around creating our lives.  You’re listening to that voice saying something is wrong with you, and “Oh by the way, all one has to do to know that something is wrong with me is look at my life.”

What if nothing is wrong with you?  What would the implications be of that conclusion on how you live your life?  What would you stop doing today that you only do because you live like something is wrong with you?  What would you start doing today that you’re not doing because you’re certain something is wrong with you?  What things have you been putting off just waiting for the day that you’re fixed?

What if you know how to create what you want?  What beliefs about yourself and about life would just fall away if you could really get that you know how to create what you want in life?  

And that’s really the point, there’s a world of thought that lives on in your thinking consistent with the beliefs, “There’s something wrong with me and I don’t know how to create what I want.”  There’s a world of concern that naturally arises with those beliefs and that world of concern gives the life you lead moment to moment.  This is not some abstract theory.  Look at your life and examine how many things you do day-to-day that result from the fact that you’re sure something is wrong with you and you don’t know how to create what you want in your life.  The ironic twist is this all results not because you don’t know how to create; it results because what you’re creating is the world of “there’s something wrong with me and I don’t know how to create what I want.”  

So I ask again, a question I’ve asked many times before (and will continue to ask).

I’m looking you right in the eye.

“What do you want to create?”

Would love to hear from you.