Your Best Future

These days I feel as though I should walk around with a helmet on.  Bad news bombs explode around me daily.  Well actually not really around me.  They explode on my TV, radio and newspaper.  Foreclosures, inflation, bank collapse, re-inflamed Iraq, failing too-expensive education, failing too-expensive health care, debt, global warming, governments beating up monks, steroids…yikes!

But what does this have to do with our personal reality?  Yours and mine?  The truth is to some degree the world is always going to hell.  Just ask someone who lived through the 20th century.  Two world wars, a depression with 25% unemployment, holocausts, the imminent threat of all-out nuclear war.  For the first 50 years of the last century we lived without antibiotics nor a polio vaccine and with legalized racism.  And…the 20th century was amazingly great.  We nearly all got indoor plumbing, lived in houses with heat, got telephones, rode on jet planes, enjoyed great movies, amazing music, high school and college education, and expanded our lifespan by 35 years.  And there was no nuclear war after all.

So was the 20th century awful?  Yes.  Was it wonderful?  Yes.  And so is 2008.  You see, reality is always both + and.  Our jobs are both satisfying and dissatisfying.  So are our lifestyles, our homes and our 14-year-olds.  Reality is messy.  It’s supposed to be.  But the Grid, our media-industrial complex, likes to present reality as an either/or certainty.  Either candidate “A” is the total answer, or he/she is the devil in disguise.  Either we’re in a full-scale financial collapse, or it’s not even a recession.  Either our marriage is gloriously fulfilling everyday, or it’s an unbearable slog of emptiness.  But either/or thinking robs us of keeping a learning, flexible mind.  One that is capable of thriving in a paradoxical world of disappointment and opportunity.

Understanding the multi-dimensional nature of reality is essential to living our “good” life.  Our choices are served up to our consciousness from our brains.  And recent research has discovered we rewire our brains minute by minute by our thoughts.  Our thinking habits create mental highways that our thoughts zoom on like an endless chain of cars in a NASCAR race.  And if we are not careful about what we think about and whether we nurture a solution orientation versus a problem orientation, we build a mental network of anxiety highways that result in “learned helplessness.”  We get in the habit of despair.  The habit of anger.  The habit of thinking like a victim.  Or not.  It’s simple; our brains focus our attention on the version of reality we choose. It’s true we are in an economic, cultural, environmental, geo-political storm. It’s also true that we live in a country and at a time where we have the personal freedom to choose our own path through the wind.  It’s no time to sit and hide.  It’s time to reflect on all the choices we’ve each made that have brought us to our particular place.  It’s time to carefully consider what our best choices are now to take us closer to the life of our most noble desires.  It’s time to fill our minds with new, creative ideas.  A time to learn new skills.  Perhaps make new friends or re-kindle our best old friendships.  It’s a time to read inspiring books.  It’s a time to walk with a deep, inner compass toward the dawn of your best future.  At least that’s what I am trying to do.  Yes life is messy.  Life is great.  What an opportunity.

Will Marre, Founder
The American Dream Project 

To visit American Dream Project’s home page, click here.
To visit ThoughtRocket, click here. 

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