You can achieve anything you want in life if you have the courage to dream it, the intelligence to make a realistic plan, and the will to see that plan through to the end.

Sidney A. Friedman

My Cherokee grandpa taught me this lesson when I was seven.  He took me to a fishing hole and asked me to throw a rock into the pond.  He asked me what I saw, and I replied that I saw a splash.  He asked me what else I saw, and I said a circle of water and another circle and another circle.  He then told me that every person was responsible for the kind of splash they made in the world and that the splash would touch many other circles, creating a ripple effect.  I sat there and watched the water until he asked me to notice the muddy bank where we were sitting.  He pointed out that one of the circular waves made by my rock was lapping at my feet, having found its way back to me.  Then he told me that we all need to be careful of the kinds of splashes we make in the world, because the waves we create will always come back to us.  If those splashes were hurtful, we will not welcome them back, but if the splash and the waves were made from goodness, we will be happy to see them come home.

The teachings of all major religions on our planet show us these same truths.  They ask us to be loving, to respect one another, and to become influences for good.  We can see the truth of these teachings when we see that energy abundantly flows through a person who has not tied up his or her life force with feelings of jealousy, envy, and the need for revenge.  By contrast, people pursuing a lawsuit, for example, feel like they cannot get on with their lives while so much of their emotions, time, and energy are tied up in a court battle.  The same limiting ineffectiveness occurs when we waste our energy on regretting the past, fearing the future, or battling with negative thoughts or feelings.  These activities create a dam of stagnant energy inside of us that keeps us from living life in a synchronistic and abundant manner.

From the moment that we experience synchronistic joy in our lives, we are put on notice that we must become aware of every thought, feeling, and action that we put into the world, owning them all as our creations.  Accountability for all aspects of our lives is a tall order.  The levels of what we are willing to be accountable for continue to increase as we grow, allowing us to be more aware.  Forgiveness toward ourselves and toward others is of paramount importance.  If we cannot forgive others and ourselves, letting go of the wounds encountered in the situations we have experienced, we get stuck.  When we refuse to forgive, we are asking for a pop quiz.  These pop quizzes can come in the form of life situations that force us to look at our personal behaviors.

Imagine a sponge that is set in a dish of water until all the water is absorbed into the sponge.  The sponge cannot soak up any more moisture because it is holding on to every drop it has absorbed.  When we hold on to our resentments and fears, our anger and bitterness, there is no room in our life for other thoughts, experiences, or feelings.  To the degree that we do not release our negative feelings and hidden resentments, we are effectively soaked in them.  The creative force of life cannot flow through us when we have dammed any part of it.  This lessens our ability to embrace new experiences.  When we clutch our wounds, using them as justifiable reasons for not moving forward, our life force is used to fuel our avoidance mechanisms.

Forgiveness and the release of the past open the creative flow of life, supporting all levels of mind, heart, body, emotion, and spirit.  This energy flow determines the state of our health, our desire to create and procreate, our willingness to develop our gifts, and how we use or deny the life force that we are given as human beings. . . . by choosing to let go of the past, our fears, and our negative patterns or reactions to life, we are suddenly funded with a resurgence of life force, which propels us into a newfound way of being and a very different way of understanding the world.
   

Keeping Simple

I've discovered recently that while it's one thing to simplify one's life and work towards making do with less, it's another thing to continue the trend and maintain the simplicity.  Life has a way of calling us rather constantly towards more complication and more complexity, and it becomes somewhat challenging to stay simple and refrain from allowing the complexities to swallow us up.

When my wife and I decided to come out west and sell our house and live in a motorhome for a couple of years, part of our reason for doing so was to simplify our lives.  We got rid of many possessions and we pared things down almost to the bare essentials, though we still have what we consider to be a good number of luxuries.  We started our jobs out here with the intention of making enough to live on, but not overdoing the amount of work so that we could enjoy our surroundings and each other's company.

Jobs, though, seem to take on a life of their own.  They grow and expand and start to offer new "opportunities" as you get better at them and as you begin to know the business and your work better.  It seems like all of a sudden there are many more possibilities in each job, but those possibilities also demand sacrifice from you as you take advantage of them.  When you get good at what you're doing, the possibility of being promoted to a supervisor position offers the "prestige" of a higher-ranking job and the benefit of more pay.  But what does the job demand?

In most situations, I'd be more than interested in promotion.  In almost every job I've done, I've taken on more responsibility than the majority of my peers, simply because I believe that it's important to do any job well if you're going to do it at all, and because I know that I benefit myself more by giving my all to any job rather than going through the motions and doing mediocre work.

But right now, our focus is on simplifying for a certain period of time.  We've just recently realized, though, that this is a continuous process of examining what we're doing and how we're doing it in order to avoid falling into the traps that life can put in our ways to make us complicate our lives unnecessarily.

At first it seemed quite simple--get rid of a lot of things and minimize your needs, and the simplicity would follow.  And in many ways, that's true.  Our lives truly are much simpler now, from the perspective of possessions as well as finances.  We don't have to deal with many of the issues that we dealt with as homeowners, and we have much more time to ourselves these days than we had before.  We take more trips to explore our surroundings these days because we have fewer commitments that keep us tied to our own area.  And while community is very important to me, there's community here, too, and we do our best to contribute to that, especially to our co-workers.

We've both come to realize recently that the simplicity we seek is going to take continuous effort to find and maintain.  And that's fine, for at least we've recognized this fact in advance, and we're able to act on it now before it's too late--we've both almost made moves that would have complicated our lives pretty dramatically, and we're able now to sit back and look and be relieved that we avoided those moves.

In a couple of years we'll be settling down again, starting somewhere anew, taking new jobs and committing ourselves to a community.  Our lives will get a bit more complicated, but we hope that with a couple of years of simplicity training under our belts, we'll be able to avoid most of the traps that are so easy to fall into.  We're learning.

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will.  Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviours and religions.  One way is right to go:  the heroes see it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under them for root and support.  They are to others as the world.  Their approbation is honor; their dissent, infamy.  The glance of their eye has the force of sunbeams.  A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate.

We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the growing person.  We stand against Fate, as children stand up against the wall in their parents' house, and notch their height from year to year.  But when the child grows to adult, and is master of the house, he or she pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger.  'Tis only a question of time.  Every brave youth is in training to ride and rule this dragon.  Their science is to make weapons and wings of these passions and retarding forces.

Now whether, seeing these two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity?  The bulk of humankind believe in two gods.  They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion:  but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere, into the other.  What good, honest, generous people at home, will be wolves and foxes on change!  What pious men and women in the parlor will vote for what reprobates at the polls!  To a certain point, they believe themselves the care of a Providence.  But, in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a malignant energy rules.

But relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always.  The divine order does not stop where their sight stops.  The friendly power works on the same rules, in the next farm, and the next planet. But, where they have not experience, they run against it, and hurt themselves. Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; — for causes which are unpenetrated.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible by intellect into wholesome force.  Fate is unpenetrated causes.  The water drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust.  But learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be cloven by it, and carry it, like its own foam, a plume and a power.  The cold is inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a person like a dew-drop.  But learn to skate, and the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic motion.  The cold will brace your limbs and brain to genius, and make you foremost people of time.  Cold and sea will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose, and, after cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England, gives a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos.  All the bloods it shall absorb and domineer:  and more than Mexicos, — the secrets of water and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon are awaiting you.

The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but right drainage destroys typhus.  The plague in the sea-service from scurvy is healed by lemon juice and other diets portable or procurable:  the depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended by drainage and vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the chain of cause and effect, and may be fought off.  And, whilst art draws out the venom, it commonly extorts some benefit from the vanquished enemy.  The mischievous torrent is taught to drudge for people:  the wild beasts they make useful for food, or dress, or labor; the chemic explosions are controlled like their watches.  These are now the steeds on which they ride.  People move in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stand on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in its own element.  There's nothing they will not make their carrier.

Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded.  Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest it should lift pot and roof, and carry the house away.  But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it must be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted.  Could he lift pots and roofs and houses so handily?  He was the workman they were in search of.  He could be used to lift away, chain, and compel other devils, far more reluctant and dangerous, namely, cubic miles of earth, mountains, weight or resistance of water, machinery, and the labors of all people in the world; and time he shall lengthen, and shorten space.

It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam.  The opinion of the million was the terror of the world, and it was attempted, either to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it over with strata of society, — a layer of soldiers; over that, a layer of lords; and a king on the top; with clamps and hoops of castles, garrisons, and police.  But, sometimes, the religious principle would get in, and burst the hoops, and rive every mountain laid on top of it.  The Fultons and Watts of politics, believing in unity, saw that it was a power, and, by satisfying it, (as justice satisfies everybody,) through a different disposition of society, — grouping it on a level, instead of piling it into a mountain, — they have contrived to make of his terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State.