Being Right, Looking Good, Digital Dimentia, Synapses, and Carl Jung. . .

How do you think the unthinkable?  With an itheberg!  Ha!  Here’s a Titanic story with a Titanic lesson:

As he stood on the deck of the Titanic, the man’s friends and family begged him to get in the lifeboat.

He replied, “Never!  This is the Titanic!  It’s unsinkable!”

As the ship sank lower and lower into the water, his friends and family implored him to get in the lifeboat, but he clung to what he knew to be right.  “The Titanic is unsinkable!” he responded time and time again.  He was so set on being right that he was eventually dead right!

Some people care more about being right than being successful.  The two most common stories we tell ourselves are about being right and looking good.  These stories originate from what we think others think of us.  We care more about the voices outside of us than the voice inside.  Please underline the next sentence.  Don’t let the voices outside override the voice inside.  That true voice inside is the Advocate I take about in my blog entry entitled "The Accuser vs. The Advocate" (https://discoveringyourgreatness.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-accuser-vs-advocate.html).  What stories have you written about your life?

Stories That Serve

Henry David Thoreau writes, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. . .What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. . .despair is concealed [] under [] the games and amusements of mankind.”[i]  Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” is one of my favorite paradoxes of all time.  We think of desperation as anything but quiet, right?  When someone is desperate, he tends to make all kinds of noise, right?  But Thoreau taps into a deep truth of human nature.

Has your life become a vacuum?  Are you caught in the vortex of a life that has sucked you into chaos, busyness, putting out fires, working paycheck to paycheck, paying the bills?  A vacuum sucks!  Don’t let your life be a vacuum!  Now, don't get me wrong.  There are a lot mundane and less-than-exciting things we must do in order to live a good life (i.e. pay the bills, balance accounts, stand in line at the grocery store, wait at the DMV, be on hold forever with a credit card company, etc.), but that is not the only thing life is about.  The events of life lead most of us to resign ourselves to an unfulfilling life because we never sing our song and live our calling, our Dream.

Instead, we cover over the despair of unfulfilled potential with the “games” or “amusements” Thoreau writes about.  There is nothing wrong with television, movies, and sporting events in moderation, but when television, movies, and sporting events keep us distracted from examining who we are, why we are, when we are, we may have a problem.  Often it seems that hectic schedules, debt, and obligations keep us from pursuing our Dream with passion, even desperation.  Instead, our desperation turns quiet.  We go through life slowly fading away, anesthetized by games, amusements, and pleasure, by television, cell phones, and social media (google digital dementia) because we think this will salve our sore hearts longing for significance when all it really does is numb the pain of disappointment and let-downs.  Sometimes it seems that the events in our lives are just too disappointing and painful to deal with.  If we can avoid thinking about the pain of a life that is not going the way we dreamed, we can pretend everything is just fine.  And once we are sufficiently numb, we don’t even recognize that this resignation is actually the despair of an unfulfilling life.

So here’s the deal.  Events happen in our lives.  It is our human nature to attach meaning to every event. Psychology and neuroscience confirm that every time an event occurs in our lives, within the synapses of the brain we create a super-highway between the event and the story we choose to believe about that event.  Every time we think of the event, the synapses fire, and we travel that super-highway between the story and the event.  We do this continually, unconsciously.  You are actually doing this right now.  If the stories are positive and serve us, then, no problem! We can walk in our Greatness.  But if the stories we write don’t serve us, they can potentially paralyze us or ruin our ability to walk in our Greatness, leading to our self-destruction.

Once we’ve written and attached the story to the event, we will either consciously or subconsciously look for other events in our lives proving the story we’ve written.  Sometimes we even create events proving the story we’ve written.

The stories we tell matter. We are always writing our stories, and eventually those stories rest in our hearts.  When this happens, it is very difficult to edit or rewrite the story, but it can be done with The Shift, a mind change.

Psychologist Carl Jung writes, “Until you make the unconscious conscious it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”[i]  All the stories we write can propel us into the great life we are meant to live.  But the trick is to pay attention to the stories we are writing, to make the unconscious stories we have been telling most of our lives conscious, and, if they do not serve us, change the stories.  This is absolutely possible.

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[i] Jung, C.J.  Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  Vintage; Reissue edition (April 23, 1989).

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[i] Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden and Civil Disobedience.