by fredX

Why change? It affects everything: your job, your relationships—everything you are a part of. Why would you want the turmoil? The world changes all the time; there’s turmoil all around us.

Turmoil exists when there isn’t resolution, when the changes around us aren’t right. If you don’t make your own changes, but let things around you drive your life, life loses a lot of its preciousness. That big chunk of confidence you get when you feel when you’ve accomplished something and drives you forward. Your sense of worth. You may not change because you’re old, maybe it’s the battles, maybe it’s the energy that the struggles have taken out of you, maybe it’s that your body can’t override pain or keep absorbing life’s beatings. Maybe mind -over-matter isn’t much of a possibility anymore. Maybe you just think, “I can’t.” No matter how old you are, one day you might get that surge of strength you feel making when you decided to undertake a new partnership or project. And in that moment—your age seems irrelevant.

Irrelevant because you believe, irrelevant because you decided, irrelevant because you know, in that one moment, if you change viewing the present as you are living it now, big things, real things are going to happen in your life, and you will be on a new plateau—maybe even a mountain, or maybe only a valley. But you will be somewhere new, at the beginning of something that matters and offers promise because—in your heart of hearts—you know it’s going to be a better place if you go there.

Progress comes in different sizes. What is the size of your progress?
What if you said your progress was saving a failing relationship?
What if you said it was being accepted as an artist?
What if you said it was your next dog? Or another child? Or no child?
What if any of these things would turn your world around and you knew it?

You need a sense of mission. And so do I. So do we all. Not a sense of self importance, a sense of power, or sense of control. Not safety, not security, not omniscience. None of those things, because those things are reflections of glory rooted in ego. No, what we need is a sense of mission coming from a sudden realization that something we are about to undertake is going to be meaningful and valuable to us as well as those around us–and will last.

The present doles out to us, on a moment-to-moment basis, leverage, harmony, and synergy. All that we need to do is recognize these moments, open all those doors, automatically, no matter how seemingly familiar—be wide eyed enough to see the new moments—and then run with them. Not with a sense of opportunism but with a sense of mission. Opportunism is fleeting; missions endure. If we embrace a mission, suddenly we find we have allies, friends we never knew we had, like-minded spirits who are already on the same planet and will join with us for the same reason: what the mission means to them.

The human race gets things done when they gather human support. When something already has support, things start falling into place. When that happens, we don’t have to work as hard. When it “wants to happen,” of its own accord–when we didn’t cold-bloodedly go out to enlist cohorts of supporters who would be our leverage to bend the world to our own wills—the world becomes a better off place to be.