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When people ask me what my book A Life Worth Living is about, I tell them it’s a book about how changing your life will save the world.  Typically, when we hear someone talk about “changing our life” or “saving the world,” just one can sound overwhelming.  “Change my life?  My god, I barely have enough time to live my life.  And forget about saving the world.”   Imagine if “changing your life” meant experiencing more joy and ease now.  Imagine if it meant experiencing more happiness and doing more of the things you want to do in life today.  Imagine if the road to these things wasn’t paved with struggle and effort; instead, the road itself was a new road in and of itself – one designed not to just get you to more of what you want one day, someday, but actually designed to give you more of what you want today.

“Alright Bill, sign me up.  But … I don’t see how me having a better life will the change the world?”  When most of look out at the world, we see a lot of struggle and effort.  There seems like so much to overcome and we almost forget that we are a part of the world.  It seems so big, so daunting and the natural response is to question whether our life actually makes a difference.  We’ve become so used to reporting on the state of the world, we forget to take into account how we arrived here today – by many, many people – people just like you – making choices over time of how to live.  What’s missing isn’t another Jesus, or a Mohammed, a Mother Teresa or a Gandhi.  And it’s not because their message was inadequate, it’s simply because there are more of us than them.  To change the world will take the same thing it took to build the world we have – many people living life a different way.  If you can take a step back and see the world as an outcome of design, then you can begin to see that what’s missing is a new kind of expert.

We’ve come to believe that all of the wonderful things we want to experience in life come as a result of hard work and struggle, and it never seems to occur to us that thinking that way has resulted in us becoming experts in the “field” of hard work and struggle.  We are hardcore experts in the field of overcoming that which we’ve created, but that expertise has come at the expense of becoming experts in the things we really want.  It’s kept us from devoting our time, energy and focus to becoming experts in the “fields” of love, joy and fulfillment.  We know how to struggle to find love, but do we know how to ease into love?  Or flow into fulfillment?

The road to becoming a new kind of expert is not a mystery.  You become an expert in these things just like you become an expert in any field: you study it.  The biggest barrier to our education is the barrier between “being and experiencing these wonderful things” and then “living real life.”    “I’ll get to learning something about love, but right now I have to deal with reality.  I have bills to pay.”  Unfortunately, who you are in your “real life” is who you are.  Each moment of life you demonstrate your expertise.

So to begin, examine your life and ask questions like, “What does my life teach people?  What does my life say about what “fields” I’m an expert in?  Am I an expert in how great life can be?  Or does my life demonstrate an expertise in making life a struggle?”  Once you understand where you expertise lies, then you can choose.  “Do I want to continue to be that type of expert?” and if the answer is no, then it’s simply a matter of asking the question, “How do I begin today?  How do I begin today to be the type of expert, the type of person that I really want to be?”

Ask new questions and you will become a new type of expert.

There’s all this talk today about the Law of Attraction or the Secret.  One of the key points in this body of work is that you attract things into your life based on your level of “vibration.”   Basically, what this means is if you’re feeling good, meaning having feelings of joy, enthusiasm and aliveness, you are focused on and attracting what you want.  If you’re feeling bad, meaning having feelings of sadness, resistance or depression, you are focused on and attracting what you don’t want.  For me, the jury is still out on whether there is this universal law of attraction.  Fortunately though, I don’t think it matters because I think the idea of “feeling good” is a useful concept to explore in the realm of design.

My book A Life Worth Living looks at life from the perspective of design.  It’s unique in that it doesn’t teach you a set of techniques to design your life; instead, it teaches you to think like a designer so that you can begin to design anything in your life.  Feeling good clearly has many benefits associated with it. When you feel good, you’re more in flow with life.  You’re more creative when you feel good.  You’re more open to possibilities and less attached to outcomes.  You’re more accepting of yourself and others.  For those reasons alone, it’s a good thing to develop the practice of feeling good.

From a design perspective, feeling good is relevant because for the most part, it’s why you’re designing what you are designing in the first place.  Think about it: why do you want more money?  Why do you want the perfect spouse?  Why do you want to be able to travel the world?  Because in some way shape or form, you want life to feel better than it does today.  You want to be happier.  You want to be more alive, more engaged in the living of your life.  Yes, you can make more money in your life by struggling.  The cost to that thinking is that once you have the money, chances are you still don’t know how to feel good.

We live in this fantasy that one day when we reach a particular destination, we will magically become these better people.  Problem is that once we get to the destination, we quickly realize that we don’t know how to be better people because we didn’t spend our time educating ourselves.  We don’t know how to be happier.  We don’t know how to be more generous.  We don’t know how to be more caring toward others.  We know how to get the things that are supposed to make us feel these things, but we don’t know how to be those people we dream of being when we arrive at our destination.  And so we are left with in this experience that perhaps something is wrong with us or something is wrong with life rather than just seeing our failure for what it is – a gap in our education.

When we design, we design holistically.  We don’t just want the million in the bank; we have visions of how life will be and feel when we have the million in the bank.  When we plan a wedding, we are not just planning a list of activities.  We are designing an experience.  We are designing how we want to feel on that special day.  When we plan funerals, we are designing a solemn, sacred experience.  We are creating the space to say goodbye to someone we love.  We are designing an experience inside of which we can honor the person’s life.

How we feel is part of the equation, and yet, often times when we set out toward a goal, we set aside how we feel as irrelevant.  I’m not suggesting that how we feel should win out at the expense of building what it is we want to build.  I’m simply saying that it’s time we included it as part of the equation.  It’s time to expand our knowledge base to shift from only answering the question, “How do we build __________?” to answering questions like, “How do we built it while feeling good?” or “How do we build it generously?” or “How do we build it while be caring toward others?”  By answering these types of questions, we’ll not only be building the things we want in our lives, we’ll also be “building” ourselves to be the type of human beings that we dream of being, and that’s a creation worth investing in.

For each of us, whatever the overall level of satisfaction we experience in our lives, chances are there is room for growth.  Chances are you want more.  Chances are you want more joy in your work, more love in your relationships, chances are you have bigger dreams that you want to fulfill, and chances are there is a bigger difference that you want to make with your life.  Regardless of what you want in the future, today your life is in some current state.

Today, if you rate your life overall a 6 (on a scale of 1 to 10), then it’s a 6.  Most of us have been taught that to find happiness the game of life is to move our 6 to a 10.  In my experience, this is not the most efficient way to create more happiness in your life.  Why is that?  The answer is actually quite simple.  First, trying to take a 6 and make it a 10 puts off the joy until another day.  The old, “I’ll be happy when….”  You don’t have to cheat yourself out of the joy of creating your life.  You can enjoy the ride now.  The second reason it’s not the most efficient way to create more happiness is you’re trying to make your life into something it’s not.  A “6” is a “6”.  A “10” is a “10.”  Period.  You cannot change a 6 into a 10, anymore than you can change a car into a boat, or a dog into a cat.  All you can do is create a 10.

To end up with a life that’s a 6, you thought like a 6, you held the beliefs of a 6 and you took action consistent with the thinking of a 6.  Given who you’ve become to date, it couldn’t have turned out any other way.  Some of you will think this is bad news or use this as more evidence that something’s wrong with you.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  This is good news; it’s really good news.  Honestly, it’s great news!  It means that your life didn’t result because there’s something inherently wrong with you.  You life resulted from your thinking.  Period, end of story.   I don’t care what’s happened to you in your life, your life resulted from your thinking.  Until you can fully own that you are the responsible for all of it, every nook and cranny of your life, you won’t fully be able to create what you want.  You’ll just be stuck trying to make a 6 into a 10, and you know how that goes.

Taking ownership of your life, declaring that you’re the author of all of it is not an act of burden.  It’s an act of freedom.   Fully owning your life gives you tremendous power because until you do, you mind is just going to keep fighting with you.  It’s just going to keep telling you how wrong he is or she is or it is or you are.  When you take ownership of it all, your mind quiets.  It sort of stops and says, “Well, alright then … what’s next?”  And when that happens then you truly are free to move on from what you’ve created (a 6) and put your focus where it belongs … on creating a 10!

Hey Everyone!  My book A Life Worth Living has been out since April 15, 2009 and so far, the reviews have been great.

Daring Adventure Life Coach Tim Brownson wrote a wonderful review in which he “highly recommended” the book and called it a “paradigm shifter.”

It’s Write Now says the book “poses some thought provoking questions” and Fearless Dreams found that the questions I raise in the book will “stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.”  

I wanted to write a book that would make people think deeply about life, and it seems these reviewers agree.  My thanks to the reviewers for taking the time to read and appreciate my book.

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.

So what is this blog really all about?  Why am I asking you to spend your valuable time reading what I’ve written?  Simple.  I’m committed to changing the world.  Well, more accurately stated, I’m committed to inventing a new world and I want to participate with others in the fulfillment of that vision.  In the first several posts, I’ve shared some ideas about how to create a better future.  I’m committed that this blog become more than that.  I’m committed it become a place where the future can actually be created. 

People seem to have a really big problem with the idea that in order to create something new, we must begin to talk about something new.  I guess it’s understandable given the quality of conversation most of us have become accustomed to combined with the fact that we are facing such seemingly overwhelming challenges that require us to act today.  How do we really create something new while so much is flying at us?   The confusion arises because for some reason we’ve decided that it has to either be one or the other.  Either we deal with what’s happening today or we sit around talking about the future.  Of course, today takes so much of our focus that talking about the future has become a joke to us.  “Oh great, we’ll all sit around and talk about a great future, and then we’ll just go back to dealing with the same crap.”  How about this?  We deal with today and talk about the future … and we don’t confuse the two.  And as far as what’s happening today, one of the simplest things we can do is to begin to talk about it differently.  Commiserating, complaining about, arguing with the way that it is does nothing to change it.  Neither does avoiding it or denying it. But neither does allowing it to dictate what you want to create in the future.  

So how do you talk about what’s happening now in a way that breaks the cycle?  You speak authentically about it.  The best part is you don’t need to have someone to talk about it with; you can do this on your own.  Just sit down and write how your life is authentically occurring for you.  “I’m really concerned that I’m going to lose my job” or “My son is such a drag on our family” or “I can’t count on my boss to do anything to back me up.”  Most of us haven’t been taught to be authentic with our thoughts and feelings, and so we go through life wrestling with all this pent up, negative emotion that continues to get more and more suppressed. 

And when I say be authentic, it’s not in the way that we typically think of authenticity.  We’ve come to associate being authentic with verbally puking on someone else (e.g., “It’s time I tell Joe what I really think of him”).   The type of authenticity I’m talking about includes being responsible for the fact that whatever you’re dealing with in life is your issue.  The people around you probably really don’t care what you think of them or about your opinions of how they should be living their lives.  The purpose is for you to get free; the purpose is not to trash the people in your life.  So you don’t have to tell your spouse, “I just don’t love you anymore, but I’m too weak to leave you,” just say it to yourself.  We seem to be afraid that if we say these things, say how it really is for us that the world will come crashing down or we’ll actually have to do something about what we said.  In fact, I think this is why we resist talking about the future, “Man, you want me to create a future too.  I’m already overwhelmed just trying to deal with what I’ve got on my plate.”  Talking is talking.  Other action is other action.  Talking about it, even to yourself, creates an opportunity for you to get clear about what you want to create in the future.

When you resist life – including how you feel about life - you’re arguing that it (whatever “it” is) should be some other way than it is.  Your particular brand of arguing may look like complaining or commiserating or it might just look like quietly going through life having given up.  The result is you spend your life in a state of resistance and this keeps your mind all tied up in knots.  Your mind isn’t free to invent what you want because it’s so occupied with resisting what is.  Being authentic allows you to get clear about how the world is occurring for you.  It allows you to fully and freely state what’s true for you in this moment of your life.  If you’re afraid of losing your house, your car, your job, so be it.  If you can’t stand the sight of your husband, your boss, or even your child, so be it.  When you can authentically state where you’re at then it opens up the possibility of asking the question, “Ok, so that’s where you’re at, that’s what’s authentic for you, those are the limits you see, … now … what do you want to create?”

And that’s really the question I’m posing with this blog.  The world is in the state it’s in, what do you want to create?  It seems like everywhere you look there’s more crisis - there’s war, hunger, poverty.  Got it.  What do you want to create?  We created a world that has a lot of amazing tremendous things in it, and yet it still doesn’t really work for most people?  If that is what’s authentic for you, I hear you.  What do you want to create?

“I want to create a better world, but I don’t know how (or I don’t think it can be done).”  Excellent, you want to create a better world, and you don’t know how (or don’t think it can be done).  Very good, you know what you want and you’ve identified some limitations.  You’re clear about where you’re at and how the world occurs for you.  “I want to make a difference in the world, but I don’t know where to begin.”  This is how you begin.  You begin by speaking authentically about where you are and then from there, ask the question, “What do I want to create?” and dwell in that conversation on your own or with others.  Dwell in that conversation again and again and again and again.  Be willing to not know for 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 conversations until something new arises and you know.  And of course, don’t just do that, live your life.  Deal with what’s happening today, and face it without resistance.  Just don’t confuse doing that with having a conversation for transformation.  And if at some point, you begin to resist what’s happening in your life, speak again authentically about how it is for you.  Write it down, acknowledge it, and then ask the question, “What do I want to create?”

I invite you right here, right now to begin a new conversation.  I invite you to stake your claim to the future.  I invite you to keep your eyes wide open, look right at the world as it is and deny nothing about it.  And then in the face of it, say something else.  The future is born in a declaration.  What’s the future you’re declaring? 

What do you want to create?

In the earlier post, “What creates a transformation?” I looked at how a declaration of what you want can be a key to causing transformation.  In that post, I said that making a declaration wasn’t the end of the creative process, just a key element to it.  So once the declaration is made, how do you create the future?  Simple. You take action.  There’s no mystery here.  Want to learn to play the piano, go sign up for piano lessons.  Want to learn to ride a horse, go take riding lessons.  Want to find a spouse, then start dating.  Want to have a new house built, go talk to contractors.  Want to start a business, lose 100 pounds, or find a new job, then take actions consistent with the future you want to create. 

This may not seem very transformational.  We know that to create anything in our lives requires action, yet knowing that it requires action and actually taking action are two very different things.  There are likely several or many areas in your life where you know what to do, but you aren’t doing it.  The past is whispering to you.  “You can’t take piano lessons, you don’t have the money.”  “You can’t have a relationship, you’ve failed at three already.”  What is that chatter describing?  It’s only describing outcomes.  Three failed relationships is not evidence for anything about the future.  You have the amount of money you have; it may not be enough to take piano lessons, but it is what it is.  Now you know that to take piano lessons, you need more money, so create the money.  “Oh wonderful, I’m already working two jobs just to make ends meet, and you want me to create more money.”  What is that chatter describing?  Again, it’s describing an outcome.  What keeps us stuck is not the condition; it’s our relationship to the condition.  It’s the chattering about “what is” that keeps us from moving forward. 

So how do you quiet the chatter?  Simple.  You declare the future.  This is something you’re going to have to experiment with, but the bottom line is the past will continue to chatter in your ear unless you say something else and say it powerfully.  Your mind can smell a lie a mile away. You mind has to know that a different future is possible and that you (not your boss, your spouse, your parents, your government, but you) are going to create it.  This is not a mindless practice of chanting what you want over and over again hoping that it will somehow magically appear in your life; nevertheless, it’s transformational. 

No transformation?  Then you haven’t said it in the way that I’m describing here.  The past is still lingering and sapping the power from your words. When you make the declaration of what you’re going to create in this way, it cuts through the past like a knife.  You’ll experience yourself letting go of the past as it lets go of you.  The lid of the default future disappears.  The illusion is cast away.  With the past quiet, your mind will naturally begin to think about and focus on how to create what you want.  Whatever comes up, do it.  You don’t need to do it right now today, but you must put it in existence to be done or at the very least, clearly declare that you’re not going to do it.  Just don’t resist.  Resistance is a product of the past.  Don’t try to fool yourself.  Like I said, your mind can smell a lie a mile away.  The moment you waver, your mind will jump on it and say, “See, it’s all bullshit.  You can’t have what you want,” and it will start chattering again, and will continue to do so until you say something different.

Does making this declaration guarantee success?  No, but if you look, failure isn’t what makes life hard.  Failure is just an outcome.  Possibility is killed in your life as a result of listening to the chatter.  It comes from living in the cage of “I can’t have what I want.”  No, success is not guaranteed, but that’s okay, because neither is failure the problem.  Standing still is.

In the end, transformation isn’t about success or failure or how we feel; it’s about what we see as possible in our lives.  I’ve used everyday things people want to create to make the point, but the ultimate point isn’t about creating those things.  This conversation is about creating a new way of life on this planet – a way of life where good things happen naturally for people, and the one thing I’m very clear about is that to achieve that end we have to get better at creating, period.  The world we want will not come about by fixing, resisting or otherwise manipulating the world we’ve already created.  It will come about in only one way: by creating it.

Part 1   |   Part 2   |   Part 3    |    Part 4

Creating the Future

In their book, The Three Laws of Performance, authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan discuss the idea of a default future: “Our default future consists of our expectations, fears, hopes, and predictions, all of which are ultimately based on our experience in the past.  Incidents from the past live on as prediction, giving us our default future.”  When you don’t see the present moment (and all of your past for that matter) as just one possible outcome, you get drawn into it and it feels like what you have is all that’s possible.  Life has that quality of being “just the way it is” and it’s all it’s every going to be.

What robs you of joy and effectiveness in life is not that something is missing about you or your life.  It’s not the lack of something; it’s the addition of something – a default future.  As Zaffron and Logan tell us your default future is just your past resurrected.  Masked as your default future, your past becomes the lid that seals you tightly into a box you’ve created – the box called your life.  But as we’ve seen, it’s all an illusion.  This is not the true nature of things.  There is no default future.  There is no lid.  There is no future.  There’s just what you’re creating in this present moment.

This doesn’t mean that there are no limits to life.  Any box you create exists inside a bigger box labeled “Life” and life certainly has limits.  If you look though, you really don’t need to worry about the limits of life.  For most of us anyway, the things we want are not outrageous demands of life.   We’re not looking to press the limits of life.  We’re just looking to have a satisfying life experience.  For that, all you need to do is to master taking the lid off, see the illusion of your default future and then invent a future that gives life to your life. 

The point of this series wasn’t to reveal the secret of life.  It was only to distinguish a piece of the puzzle that often goes overlooked.  I think it’s an important piece, a key even, but it’s certainly not the only one.  It is though one of those more challenging pieces of the puzzle to see and fit in place.  

You know, not an edge piece … a middle piece.

Part 1   |   Part 2   |   Part 3    |    Part 4

A Moment in Time

If all of life is actually lived in the present moment, then it makes sense to examine the present a little more closely.  The question I want to delve into more deeply is “What exists in a present moment?”  We already know that in our own subjective experience, we have these “things” called our past and our future, but what about what’s going on out in the world?  Imagine we could stop time and examine one “frame” of life – the world at one moment in time.  What would we see?  We’d see life, right?  We’d see houses, cars, roads, people, desks, trees, rakes, and ditches.  We’d see food, televisions, guns, tanks, buildings, and jewelry.  We’d see people being shot and killed in war.  We’d see other people dying from starvation.  We’d see others sitting on their private yacht in the Caribbean while others sit at work talking on the phone.  We’d see outcomes.  In any snapshot of life, in any moment, what exists is just a set of outcomes.

How did we arrive at the outcomes?  We end up at the outcomes of our lives based on the decisions and choices made over time in the past.  This moment you’re experiencing right now is a product of the past.  You’re reading these words because I decided to write them at some point in the past.  You’re reading these words because you decided to buy a computer at some point in the past.  You were able to buy a computer because you have a job.  You have a job because you went to college and because some person or persons decided to establish the organization you work for, on and on.  Every present moment is just a set of outcomes; outcomes that resulted from past thinking and action. 

This point, while obvious is nevertheless significant because, in life, there’s what is – the outcomes of life – and then there’s what you think about what is, and how you relate to it.  In reality, your life is just an outcome.  Your past is just filled with outcomes.  Today is just an outcome.  Tomorrow will be just another outcome.  Say whatever you want about it; it ain’t gonna change.  We don’t related to (and therefore talk about) our lives as outcomes.  We talk about our lives like something is wrong with them.  Something is always happening in our lives that shouldn’t be happening, when the reality is that whatever “it” is, is happening, and we spend our time trying to fix and change what already is!

Yes, of course, that people are starving is a horrible thing.  Yes, of course, your boss being abrasive is annoying.  That your child is failing algebra is cause for concern.  Relating to something as an outcome doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  It’s when you don’t relate to it as an outcome that you become stuck with it.  Begin today to see all that’s happening before your eyes as a mere outcome.  Right now, stop fussing over the state of your life.  All of it is just life catching up to what was said (and thought) at some time in the past. If you understand and master this, quiet all the explanations for why it is this way, and stop fixing life, then you open the possibility of really of creating a different future.