Very few of us look forward to major changes in our lives. Once we become comfortable with how our lives are working, even if they aren’t, it can be very upsetting to have them changed by someone else, or make the changes ourselves. No one likes to be out of their comfort zones. How can we make changes that aren’t uncomfortable?
First we have to be honest with ourselves and identify what it is that’s not working. We can’t change our realities, our lives, until we’ve established the cause of our discomfort. Many of us go through life disliking our jobs, our personal relationships, the government, our financial status, etc., but either don’t know how to change what we dislike (we’ll look at that next week), are afraid the changes will be worse than our present situations or deny that anything is wrong.
If we’re not passionate about what we do, who we’re with or what we’re accomplishing in life, we need to look at what we’ve been doing that hasn’t worked and then quit doing it. If our diet has perpetuated a hereditary propensity toward diabetes 2, continuing to eat the same foods won’t cure the problem. If we’ve gone from one job to the next, always staying in the same field, or from one abusive relationship to another we need to truthfully ask ourselves what we really want from life. Paying the bills is important, so are relationships, but life should also be fun. Research has proven time and again that if we’re unhappy, the next step is deteriorating health and disease. It’s like having a sticker in your shorts or a bad fitting pair of shoes. The discomfort may be small, but eventually a blister or bunion forms and life becomes even more difficult, even if we’ve gotten used to it and no longer realize there’s a problem on the conscious level.
One of the ways a lot of us try to change our reality is to take on the lifestyle, and reality, of someone else. We think a friend, or some celebrity, has the lifestyle that would be perfect for us, until we try to mimic it. When we find out it doesn’t work and we like it less than we did our old lifestyle, we’ve probably compounded our problems. We may also find that we’ve assumed the other person’s karma, and that can prove disastrous. I have a longtime friend who I thought was so cool when we were in school together. At some point in time, I discovered my own identity and realized his choices weren’t mine and wouldn’t work for me. I’m glad I did. His choices didn’t prove beneficial for him, and I’m sure they wouldn’t have done any better for me.
Too often we put our fate in some else’s hands and when it doesn’t work, we blame them. The present financial situation is a good example. Home equity loans were being touted as a way to have your cake and eat it too. New cars, and other stuff, were readily available with a home equity loan. It was a simple sales pitch: “Just borrow the money for the stuff you want and the rise in home equity will take care of the loan.” All you had to believe was that the housing market would always and forever continue to go up. Most sayings have a basis in truth, and “What goes up, must come down” is one of them. The majority of those who succumbed to the siren song of consumerism wanted to.
We can point fingers but there are no victimizers without victims, and too many people were, and are, willing victims. Now we have a situation where the government is stepping in and telling private enterprises how to run their businesses. Even though many of those businesses brought it on themselves, we’ll all get the bill and the trickle down will include others who weren’t at fault. We also have to ask ourselves, “Who is more wasteful than big government?” We all know the answer is, No one!
All of this takes us back to the lady in Cove, OR where we were going to volunteer to help her with her organic garden. She didn’t know, and probably didn’t want to know, what she wanted to do or to be. She wasn’t honest with us when we contacted her before going there. In all likelihood, she wasn’t honest with herself either. Hopefully, all of us learned a lesson from the experience. By making it obvious that her indecision impacted us all in a negative way, maybe she sat down and thought about why things went wrong. If she didn’t, we can’t be responsible for that. In our case, we need to listen more to our intuition and step back from situations that are giving us hints that something isn’t right.
Can we change our reality? I believe we can, but it might prove too uncomfortable for some.
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