Do or don't, life keeps going...

Basking in the late afternoon sun in the studio

As a friend said the other day, “Life is lifing”. You know, when things are going slightly askew in ways that aren’t necessarily to your liking but you’re working through it, because that’s what you do. The alternatives are also not to your liking and can be even worse, so you just push on. Reroute your plans and find new paths, just like in art. Shift your perspective just a bit and life somehow finds a way forward with you. Not “for you”, because there’s no change without your involvement. This is the part that I think a lot of people forget when things go sideways. The cycles of life continue with your involvement or not. If you want to change something about your circumstances, then you’d best act because everything else will still be moving.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to stretch myself and ways of thinking in ways that I haven’t done before. Growth is happening. It hard and it’s rewarding because I’m noticing things about myself and how I’m responding to challenges in real time that’s helping me be more clear about a lot. Thankfully, this isn’t new to me now, but it stands in stark contrast to the me of my 20’s-early 30’s when I had a penchant for allowing every bad (or seemingly bad) situation to get me tied up in knots for days on end about what I “should’ve/could’ve” done instead of fighting for a solution then and there. Growth happens and thankfully enough years and experiences have passed that I have a much better handle on how I react and move forward.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I see life as a continual mix of consequence and coincidence. You do “that” and “this” happens as a direct result. But often, along the way, a third thing happens (coincidence) that can present another path or, perhaps, lead to a completely unrelated journey with its own set of intertwined correlations. Everything, and I mean everything, is connected. There’s no way around it. If you allow yourself to look beyond what’s right in front of you, over time you’ll begin to see patterns of cause and effect, but also of what seems to be coincidence. Coincidence often appears random and often is just happenstance, but sometimes that collision of similarities from different worlds can trigger deeper thinking about a situation that’s not even related. You think about someone you haven’t seen in a long time, turn a corner and there they are! You get to talking and the conversation turns to your search for a house. Oh, they happen to be in real estate or know someone who’s a realtor…

I’m sure we’ve all had situations like this occur that seem like God, universe or whatever deity of choice is looking out for you. However, none of it works without you also following through. Like the old saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. You can be handed all of the most direct clues or help available but if you don’t act, then you’re no closer to whatever it is that you want than you were the moment before. Maybe it isn’t the right time for you to act on something, but that doesn’t negate the connections that were there. Now, were those connections purposefully directed towards you? No one can really know for sure. The only thing that’s certain is that you and those messages were in the same place and time. What happens from there is completely up to you. Just some thoughts on a snowy, then sunny, then cloudy Saturday.