Well, what prompts you to change direction? A waterfall isn’t literally around every corner; you can only imagine the impact that being swept down Niagara Falls could have on you, compared to a slide down the embankment behind the bike sheds, because you had other things on your mind! Both could be life-changing! Falling and getting a little scratch may be enough to prompt you to respond and ask yourself: ‘What if…?’ You could wrestle with statistics or measure the probability of something else happening, had you fallen further or had the scratch been worse – that’s if maths is your strong point. Then again, you could argue that falling down and getting a scratch isn’t sufficient to help you change direction, unless you happened to be doing something else behind the bike sheds that resulted in that family circle being formed earlier than planned.
Does a direction imply we are going forwards along our path or do we go backwards along the same path as well? If you went backwards on the same path, then ultimately you would be able to undo all the actions you did, right? This sounds more like time-machine territory! So, when we say, “I feel I am going backwards in my life”, what is it you feel is happening? You are moving forward through your day. Even when the clocks go back an hour, you are physically present to witness the artificial hands of time spin anti-clockwise and provide you with another sixty minutes to play around with. Nonetheless, you are cruising along in the same direction – even if you’re asleep.
If you happen to be airborne and travelling to a part of the world that is behind your own time zone, the aircraft won’t be flying backwards. And let us assume, for now, that time doesn’t ‘go’ backwards, either. So, when you get to your destination, it is only when you come to look at your watch do you get a sense that something has changed, having had no recollection of being dematerialised along the way and transported to an alternate universe! I dare say that if you changed the time on your watch before you took off then your sense of ‘time’ may not have seemed so alien to you upon landing. After all, time doesn’t stop going forwards just because you put your watch back and neither does your life.
On the other hand, if you are thinking of going backwards and return to doing something you have done before, maybe you will do it better this time. But if you didn’t do it very well before, then what has changed now to make you think it will be good to try it again? Do you need to go back along the same path or can you consider that what is waiting for you ahead could be far more interesting than what you did before. And ‘waiting ahead’. What does that even mean? Could it be that something is already positioned on your path, sitting cross-legged and arms folded, waiting patiently for you to arrive before getting up to greet you with open arms and shouting ‘hallelujah’? You can’t even claim to have stood up the blob of imaginary opportunity, if you didn’t know it was waiting for you – just like a blind date that has been set up by your friend, who forgot to tell you when and where! You can be forgiven for not arriving on time.
Adding to this scenario and injustice, assume that you don’t arrive on time because you missed a turning on the way there. You end up going backwards instead of forwards to take the one that you originally intended and by the time you get to it, you begin to question if it is the same one you passed before. Depending on how much time has elapsed, it will hopefully appear recognisable. But if it doesn’t look the same, can you accept this as a sign for you to bypass it altogether and trust that fate has a more attractive path for you to follow, just up the road?
Think of a time you have been on a motorway and missed the turning – so you take the next exit, instead. You go around the roundabout, across the bridge and come back down the other side – you are going backwards along the same motorway you just came up, but forwards because you are not driving in reverse gear, I hope. Finally, you take the next left turning, which is on the opposite side of the road from where you had originally planned to be – once over the bridge you are now in the right direction, for you. But what if you kept going forwards on the motorway; would that have still been in the right direction?
Geographically, you could argue that taking the next turning would have got you there eventually. It may have taken you a bit longer and a few extra miles out of your way but what’s a few more minutes added on to your journey, and who knows, the adventure may do you good! Maybe what is waiting for you decides to lie down out of boredom and appear as nothing more than a sleeping policeman designed to slow you down in life, as you pass through an equally sleepy village it serves to protect. This is after being intercepted by a herd of cows that choose to cross your path, forcing you to take in the charming scenery that would otherwise be overlooked had you still been bombing along in the fast lane, at whatever speed, on the motorway.
A path takes you from ‘A’ to ‘B’ (physically or emotionally). Think of it as a road trip and hopefully you have a destination in mind. If you were told in advance it was going to be an adventure would you want to miss out on all the fun or does that depend upon your approach to life and what ‘type of person you are’? Have you always been an adventurous character or has a past experience curtailed any future desire to put adventure before sensibility, ever again! Maybe you would like to be more adventurous, yet cannot fathom out where to begin; after all, what does adventurous mean?
Do you opt for a challenging path, because it will make you stronger and the element of surprise only inspires you to go on, to discover more, fuelled by adrenaline? Or would you prefer to find the short cut; the easier one that could get you ‘there’ a bit quicker but could land you in a whole lot of trouble along the way and will still present its challenges, whether you are using the motorway or taking a cross-country detour?
It is never just about us. We interact with people on their path and they interact with us, on ours. At what point, and how, they intercept can play a huge part in whether we stay on a path or change direction. We influence each other, even without any contact. We may not know that person on a personal level – we may have never met that someone – but something they said or did prompted us to make a change and initiated a turning point in our lives. This could be about a celebrity or even a character in a fiction book you are reading; something they said inspired you. A newsreader will describe the unseen footage of despair and destruction in a place where you have never been. You watch, you listen, you read and you interpret.
What is happening when all of this is going on? Are we being drawn into what someone else is doing along their path – even from a distance? If you haven’t met them they don’t know you exist but you know they exist! Did their actions affect you? We may not be aware that another person’s actions or opinions have an impact on us at the time, but later they pop up in a conversation and you think, When did I hear about that?
Commuters on a train interact with other people visually or vocally. Maybe none of those subliminal or tiny interactions will make a difference to that person on that particular day; but who knows the effects of things seen or heard that day on another situation encountered later in the week, the month or in later life. These experiences are nicely tucked away in the not-for-now part of the mind’s database, as something that may never knowingly be tapped into again. How valuable we are and yet we don’t even know what we are worth. If we had to download all the information caught on our own mental camera, every day – apart from being dangerous – we could be worth millions!
So how we continue along our path, going forward, may be influenced by how we interpret an opinion or a piece of information, and can change how we may decide to go about something we had planned on doing one way, but now decide to do another way – or not at all.
People’s opinions may be signposts in disguise and just when you thought those signposts didn’t exist they pop up to offer a little direction! Other people and their positive or negative energies will collide with yours but it is still your path. They have intercepted like a bunch of free radicals moving in and out of your life, bouncing aro
und, leaving their mark, and you don’t realise the impact, at the time.
Once the gates are opened, our life-long membership will have an expiry date – we just don’t know when that is. Many of us will see our lives as just a period of time that exists, to do as much or as little as can be done, and there doesn’t have to be a mysterious hidden meaning behind every decision we make – neither does every experience need to be analysed.
It can also be a chance to exploit as many opportunities as is viable, and some of us prove to do this exceptionally well, leaving others feeling a tad envious. Alas, living a full life doesn’t mean it has to be filled with copious amounts of experiences that may not necessarily add up and give rise to any one thing in particular being fulfilled, as you speed down your path, trying to pack as much in to it as possible (remember you have to carry your baggage). All those experiences will have involved their own sacrifices along the way and some can disadvantage your life in one area or another. The upside to living a full life is that it puts you in credit with ‘The Bank of Life Lessons’. No, that doesn’t mean you will automatically end up becoming wiser than the next person, who didn’t task themselves with acquiring credit in this way. A life full of one or two things which satisfy the appetite may be all that is required for some of us, and will bring with it its own set of experiences to last a lifetime.
Be that as it may, someone else’s path can often seem more appealing. It can also be an illusion of perfection. We can overlook the fact that we all think and behave differently, and so walking in someone else’s shoes may not suit us, in the end, as we realise our approaches to situations are unalike. Our customs and cultures, our diversity and our dissimilarity all present us with different obstacles and delights along our paths. Whether these actualities lie ahead on the main road that keeps us focused, or silently surprise us when we have chosen to take a detour, they will not, alone, allow any two situations to be the same.
Some people have an idea where they want to get to in life but don’t know where to start; that sounds like a coach’s dream client. Likewise, you can have an epiphany about a desire to get started on something and feel uncertain about where you could end up because you hadn’t formulated a clear picture – yet!
If you don’t know where the final destination is going to be, can you still get started? Of course you can; don’t be put off by anyone that tells you otherwise! Sometimes we find out where we want to be – by accident. How many times have you gone out for the day, not knowing quite which direction to take, and half a mile down the road you think, Ah yes, how about… that-a-way! Who knows if you were divinely guided; saw a sign on the way which prompted your brainwave to signal left or right; or suddenly you just knew… because you remembered something that someone said on the train from… months ago!
You could take the view that if you don’t know where you want to go then how on earth can you plan a route? No one is saying it is easy to be inspired or indeed get motivated but if you take a few small steps in a direction that feels comfortable then inspiration may be one of those delights that just happen to be sitting on your path ahead – waiting for you! Call it a blind date!
Discovery and exploration is going on all the time, whether we are aware of this or not. It is difficult to avoid it happening but the gap, when observed, between discovering something new and going on to explore it further, will depend on what has been discovered and whether it’s of any interest and importance to you, at the time.
For example, discovering after all these years that you like fresh peas may seem interesting because you have only tried mushy peas in the past, which you’ve always detested. It is not something you are inclined to ponder on for too long, if at all. The emotional distance (the gap), between discovering it is possible to like peas and exploring why, will be wide; the result isn’t likely to impact on a great deal as you walk your path!
Now working out what you want to do with the rest of your life could be different. You will be actively discovering and exploring ideas or opportunities in order to ‘get somewhere’, ‘be someone’ or ‘achieve something’. Discovering and exploring any potential link will become a two-way street and you gain a thirst to explore, once something interesting has been discovered. The distance now, between discovery and exploration, will be less; the gap will be closing in. It is the start of a beautiful friendship and this time you are engaged!
There will be an endless number of things to discover and explore on our own path and all the other characters, which haven’t even got a mention yet, will no doubt be influential. They will influence how much we toddle off to do and how we go about doing it. Emotions will get in the way of doing some of those things very well and, thankfully, allow us to achieve others that we thought would be impossible.
Do we agree, in principle, that a path is a journey we go on through life, even if the word journey is one of those annoying words that you want to reserve for describing something you start when boarding a bus or train? One life plan is made up of layers of tarmac in the sky but not without its potholes, flyovers, underpasses and neon-coloured picket fences that line your path – so you don’t keep falling off. Yet it is multi-layered, multi-faceted and fragmented and the only other way to get off, before the exit hatch opens up, is to jump off – and sadly some of us do.
A path, for some of us, can be a lonely stretch of space; one which we walk alone, even when we are surrounded by people. For others loneliness can feel a remote place and one which sees no visitors. Seeing our own world sitting alongside other people’s worlds, which don’t connect, can feel isolating but we often have the option to build bridges, if we want to do so. If we can connect with ourselves first and learn to start our discovery from within, we can channel our truth through our thoughts, our voice and our heart.
I realise it is one thing offering up this perspective and another thing working out how to do it in practice. I believe there is a way – a way of throwing this idea around. If it happens to be one of those I stuck in a balloon at the beginning, maybe a few of the characters itching to join us can step in shortly, catch the end and share some of their candyfloss.
After all, your path is a playground to be explored!
C*H*O*I*C*E
Join the Brigade and
Get in Line!
“After all, it happened to me. It wasn’t my fault and if I could change it I would, but naturally – I just didn’t have a choice!” she said.
“The funny thing is, I was on this path and a situation bumped into me. I am sure I didn’t bump into it (the situation) and I found myself taken in by it all and so I went along with it. I didn’t have a choice… you know?” he said.
“This path analogy – wow; if I could really make one work for me then I am sure I can choose where I want it to go, and how and where I want it to end! I have heard about the ‘Create your dream’ speech and ‘The like-attracts-like’ concept that underpins nearly all the motivational speakers’ keynote speeches on the planet! Has anyone heard about it? They say, ‘Think it… and it will happen’; ‘Feel it… and then you’re halfway there’ (wherever there is). Then apparently, you let your thoughts go and leave it up to the Universe to deliver – well that’s the last bit, I think,” said by the one who has now decided to investigate further into this incredible idea that there is a post office situated somewhere in the sky, collecting these thoughts. There must be a postman (or woman) working flat out, capable of either dropping a bombshell on you when you least expect, or bringing you what you asked for without paying the postage.
So, as I am the one who continues to be a masochist and exhaust the above concept (as I do think there is something to be said for letting go…), I also recommend having a back-up plan! This is to avoid twiddling your thumbs during the process and do something that doesn’t involve over-thinking.
On one particular day, after sending a request, I took my interest to another level – some may sa
y, quite literally, another universe. It was when I began to count the number of Pendolinos that ran through my local train station in my lunch hour, out of the window at work, that I decided I was taking this law of distraction theory too far. This was either an activity that demonstrated I had moved on or was a cry for help, as I was slowly losing the will to live! If you haven’t heard of a Pendolino, it is a train that runs at incredibly high speed to get you from A to B faster than you can say, “Law of Attraction”!
I didn’t really notice any attachment between my brain and the impending manifestation. Needless to say, I was silently hoping that the latter would happen as soon as possible; you can’t help but remain poised, keeping one eye open. I usually left my standby light on and took comfort in believing that communications were at large. I was willing to go along with the idea that the thought I originally had could get transported into another dimension and return looking something close to the original intention.
I believe in the Law of Attraction process although I am not going to be writing a book about it in any detail. I think a couple of lines here and there will suffice. Any intolerance beginning to build up, for those of you who’d prefer to skip ahead, will soon notice it pass. So kindly smile at the point of view, recognise it shapes a space on the page and allow it to walk by – as you would with any stranger in the street. Think of it as one of those extras that appear in a film, in the background, and focus on the main characters that are sneaking in to warm you up.
Emotional Sandwiches Page 4