Every day begins again

“Begin at the beginning and go on till

you come to the end: then stop.”

King to the White Rabbit
Carrol, L.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

It’s all about communication isn’t it?  Finding ways to share our world, that is the world (mind) in which we live, with the worlds of others.  Communication is the basis for expressing and receiving meaning in life.

Let’s begin with the alphabet.  It allows us to communicate by the written word.  In the English language it starts with the letter ‘a’ and ends 25 letters later with ‘z’.  Twenty-six individual letters leading to words…words to sentences…sentences to paragraphs…paragraphs to essays, stories, books, manuscripts and the list goes on.  

It is awe-inspiring to consider the sheer volume of written material based on these simple, seemingly meaningless letters.  Yet through the mixing and matching of them, commerce has developed, countries formed, hearts made to soar and minds to imagine the unimaginable.

For the teller of tales, there is the drive to express ideas, convey the story and communicate the notion.  The reader becomes, in a sense, the voyeur who slips deftly, both into the story as well as the mind (world) of the author.

There was a time when all that existed was in oral tradition. The spoken word carried the message to the ear of the hearer.  Stories of the valiant fell from the lips of the gifted tellers, to the ears of the fortunate who heard them.  These were passed from mind to mind, generation to generation, taking on new life, and enrichment as they traveled through the years.  Some say oral traditions have existed for 50 to 100 thousand years!

Around 6 thousand years ago, an area known as the Fertile Crescent in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, (general area of Iraq today), pictures began to emerge…orderly pictures – or pictographs – that could be used consistently to express ideas without the presence of the originator of the words.  From these formative efforts, came written language(s).

Written language constructed of sentences typically has a subject and some action related to that subject.  Life is a little bit like this.

The sentence of life...

Each of us is a story of sorts, made up of a spiritual alphabet – for lack of a better term.  In the mixing pot of life, we all have a similar foundation from which we emerge.  Like letters of the alphabet, we have basic characteristics such as wisdom, peace, understanding, faith, curiosity, joy, anger, gentleness, envy, greed, and this list goes on.  This is the world in which we live.

To carry the metaphor… life is composed of nouns and verbs.  We are beings, the central focus in the sentence of our lives – the noun.   That, of course is not enough, for we – the noun – must have a verb, we must act, for there is little doubt that without action, there is not much life - life rewards action.

The unique mixing and matching of these spiritual elements, as it were, create the distinctive individual we are.  It is awe-inspiring to see the innumerable mixtures of personalities that emerge from the spiritual alphabet from which we are created.

What is the story?

We then become the teller of the tale – the tale of our lives.  We tell it every time we meet or interact with someone.  The great thing about it, however, is that we actually can consciously and deliberately write the tale the way we want it to be.

If we recognize and understand we have control over the sentences we write in our lives – that is to say the way we use the spiritual alphabet we have been given – the clearer and more focused our lives become. 

Cultivate our curiosity and it will be stronger, exercise our understanding and it will grow, nurture our kindness and it will excel.  We can also starve our anger and watch it dissipate; re-channel our frustration and watch it whither; change focus from our envy and watch it dissolve.  This doesn’t mean pretending these characteristics are not there, but actively choosing to engage something else in their place - where we put their heart, is what we will become...for better or worse.  It is in our control.

Choose this day!

We are all authors and storytellers.  The story of our lives is yet untold, every minute of every day we have the opportunity to choose the things we want to write in the book of our life.  What has been written in the past, may inform the present, but absolutely DOES NOT have to predict what the next event will be.  The next chapter will be determined by the choices we make right now, at this moment in time.

Setting a plan regarding the way we want the lives we live in our world (mind) is up to us and nobody else.  We do not have to simply be a bystander and or a victim of our thoughts and feelings. 

Go to the blackboard today and begin to write what you want that story to be.

 
- ted