The daily grind becomes a blur of days running together in the long line of occupied cubicles in the windowless office. People complacent in their mediocrity work from cradle to grave playing a zero-sum game whose only objective is to stay one paycheck ahead of the bills. Time becomes separated into the 5-day block of production and the 2 days of domestic bliss.
Yes, we live in a post-industrial technological era. With all of our advances have we really mastered this thing called life? Some may say we’ve reached a pinnacle with better health, a more comfortable lifestyle and easily obtained, readily disposable everything. Yet in the midst of this entire wonder, countless people, maybe even you, have felt a serious disconnect. This underlying feeling of emptiness can’t be filled with more stuff.
We carry on, switching careers to feed the never-ending fire of consumption. Pushing to work harder and longer to attain that well-established measurement, “Keeping up with the Jones’.” We give up pieces of ourselves to stay in a marriage. We kiss up to the boss to preserve our job. We stuff our faces with food to soothe ourselves and then crash diet to lose the extra baggage.
Then one day it happens. All of your hard work and dedication to the company, the family, the state crashes down up on you. You get the pink slip a week before your Christmas bonus. You hear your husband break the news; he’s found someone new. You get a nice audit courtesy of the IRS. Suddenly you have no one to report to and you find yourself with a nagging empty hole filled with nothing but time. Your fear wells up as quick as your tears. Frustrated and feeling despair you look to the sky and ask, “Why me?”
It isn’t all bad. You sleep in for the first time in years. You step out your back door, and not just to mow the lawn, but also to actually sit down on that patio that added another $7,000 to your 30-year mortgage. You notice the sun rising, the birds singing. It’s cold and you remember just a few short weeks ago how you had to keep such a careful watch on the air conditioner so your electric bill wouldn’t sky rocket. Yes, the seasons have changed. Yes the sun is running on its course. Now that you have too much time on your hands you actually stop and take notice. You begin to notice the cycles that take place everywhere you look. The machinery of the universe opens up to you.
So too, these sudden changes of events in your personal life are bringing on the end of an era. Like the winter season, you see things that have lived in your life dying off. You struggle with this, resisting the changes that are inevitable. You grasp at straws trying to preserve your career, save your marriage, putting on the brakes and screaming, “stop the train, I want to get off!”
Change is the only constant in life. It is the way this whole existence operates. Things come and go, all in their proper time. Why do you resist it? Is it the fear that nothing new will arrive to take the empty space and fill it again? Do we not see the lessons around us?
I’ll propose that in order to advance, the pond must sometimes be stirred. When a pond gets stirred up, the mud on the bottom rises to the surface, but in time it will once again settle down and the water becomes clear again. Resisting this process will only agitate the water that much more.
In the course of your life, cycles will run their course. Friends will come and go. Family will be born, live, grow old and die. Jobs will begin and end. You have only to look around at the natural world and see that this is proper. What if instead of resisting these cycles you actually embraced them? How could you transform your life by flowing with these cycles? Trust me when I say, this isn’t a personal vendetta thrust at you to make you suffer. Learn to let go. Our own anatomy points to this. Blood pumps. Respiration draws in oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. We spend a part of our day conscious and another part sleeping. We don’t fear lack of oxygen when we breathe out. Yes, there will be more air to take our next breath. We don’t stop sleeping because we fear we won’t wake up again. So why should we try to apply the brakes when our life begins to change shape?
The key is to understand that these cycles are normal. This isn’t a symptom of impending doom, just an indication that we are beginning a new chapter. How do we process change in a positive way? We must focus on our breathing. Long, slow deep breaths are a natural cure for fear, and fear is what we are struggling with. When we learn to breathe, and to let go, we allow the mechanics of the universe to
operate at peak efficiency. We get out of our own way and begin to allow new things to come into our lives.
Years ago, when I was a teen, I struggled with panic attacks. The anxiety would well up and I’d feel my heart race. My breathing grew shallow and I thought I was going to die. Fear was causing me to seizure. Once I learned to accept that my heart was capable of handling the faster pace, that I needed to slow my breathing and let go of my fear, my attacks stopped.
If you hadn’t changed in your early years, you would still be crawling. You would have to cry out to get fed and hope someone would love you enough to do so. You’d still wet your pants. Thank goodness we didn’t stay in that era! Would you really have wanted to stay in adolescence with the awkwardness of puberty and the endless days of school and homework?
When you see changes occurring in your life, you must recognize the cycles, and think to yourself, “OK, the changes are coming and it’s a natural part of life.” Remain calm and find peace in knowing that the end of one cycle makes way for the beginning of a new one. In the stillness you create, begin to look for the opportunities in the change rather than what you are giving up. Anticipate the new space and begin to think of what you can fill it with. You will almost certainly begin receiving messages from the universe telling you the best things to do. Remain alert but calm and look for these signs.
Once you completely embrace change, you’ll find life will become a lot more exciting. You’ll see that you lose a lot of the attachment you have been putting on the things in your life. You’ll love more deeply because you aren’t afraid of losing. You’ll live more completely because you won’t kill yourself to keep your job. You’ll be more connected to yourself because you won’t fear being accepted. You will become the free agent charting out the adventure called your destiny.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Bill White, The Synchronicity Expert
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