Life is a choice. Do we make our choices or do our choices make us? Do we make choices anew or do we make decisions based on past experiences and behavioural patterns? If our past choices have worn grooves in us, then how free are our choices? If you meet something that is completely new and foreign, then generally you are open to it. After you experience it, you develop an attitude around it, so that everything that is part of your life has a previous disposition. But the minute you think you know someone, you’ve stopped really looking at them. When you think you know something, you cease to know. You justify and clamp down on your reality without being open to expanding it. Our thoughts seem to bring awareness, but actually they block our real awareness. Our thoughts are hooked to our principles, beliefs, judgments and idealizations. We get used to thinking a certain way. But the majority of our thoughts are repetitive and useless. Generally, we steer our life in a particular way because that’s where we have justified our narrow reality and we fool ourselves.
We need to become aware of what is making us choose. If we are unaware, we will certainly just keep repeating the past. If we merely recycle our choices, then we are no longer present, connected or growing and we lose ourselves. Do you take the risk of growing in each new situation?
When you have an argument, how open are you? How flexible are you to see a new way? When you have an experience that brings pain and creates a wound, then when you experience that again the pain comes to us as a warning signal. Our feelings are exquisitely specific; they hold the memory of our lived reality. They are largely historic and past tense. We tend to choose the feelings we like and choose experiences that will bring more of them more often. The ones we don’t like we avoid. So we try to make our way through life trying to avoid discomfort. But sometimes we have to go there in order to grow. We tend to think that feelings come from the present source and so we blame the other for ‘making us feel’ a certain way, therefore disempowering ourselves. Actually the feelings are from our past and we are remembering the pattern of history. When we get pushed out of shape, it is because stuff from the past is still being carried with us. In the present we have the chance to be open. Either our present moment gets invaded by the past or gives us the opportunity for a fresh perspective in which the present can heal the past. Either we are open and receptive to the present moment, or we just tell the same stories and stop seeing. Either we are growing, or we are dying. God invites us into the new; to expand our vision. God will always surprise us. If He doesn’t, it’s because we are trying to control it. When we are only living in our own truth, we are not living reality. In every connection, we are being asked to change; we are being invited into a bigger self.
Life is always a creative risk.
God is concerned with healing our past and giving direction for the future, but He connects with us in the present. God invariably calls us out into a new reality. How open are we?
