We tend to believe the things that we think about ourselves.
Our biography, our talents, our challenges.
That story that you always tell about how you overcame your fear to enter and win the big race. Or the story, often deeper, that we are somehow not enough.
I want you to set those aside for just a moment. You will continue to think those thoughts. You will continue to think all kinds of thoughts. That is how we are made. We are thinking machines.
But occasionally, our thoughts settle.
If you take a moment, you might see your thoughts settle, just a bit, even right now. Like the snow in a globe when you stop shaking it.
It’s what happens when we aren’t trying to manipulate our thinking. Calm and clarity is our default state.
It’s in these moments that fresh thinking is possible. It’s in these moments that you might begin to see who you really are.
Not your thoughts. Not your accomplishments, your history, your redemption story.
What I see, in myself, and in you, is the infinite capacity to create. And everything has this capacity.
A tree, a flower, a dog, all create.
Humans create primarily through thought. They think, and then they experience and feel those thoughts as reality.
The fact that our experience of life is 100 percent internally generated, that we only experience and feel our own thinking rather than something happening outside of us, creates some odd results that we accept because we don’t tend to see them.
We establish “the rules” through our thinking and then judge others (and often ourselves) for not following them. We establish goals through our thinking and then judge based on whether we’ve met them.
We accept our own and others’ stories of who we are and allow them to confine us.
We create “I’ll have arrived when I…” stories and then suffer until we do. And then we suffer again when we see that we are no different than we were before.
We miss that we are judge and jury. We miss that we have made it all up. We don’t see how small we have made ourselves and the world.
All you are is the infinite capacity to create.
How are you using it?
How are you creating yourself? How are you creating your partner, your colleagues, your adversaries? (Even the idea that you have adversaries?)
What if you stopped, just for a moment, to see everyone, yourself included, as they really are?
What would you create then? And what would you stop creating, because you saw it doesn’t serve you?