To achieve a dream, you must invest. The sooner you invest, the more time you have for your dream to turn into a big success. Or like the Chinese proverb: ‘The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now’. If you weren’t already working on a dream, now is always a good moment to start. Make the decision. Take action. Sow the seed. And don’t dig it up a day or two later, for progress takes time. Give it time, and attention. What water is to a tree, is attention to a dream.
“Sleep is the best meditation”, the Dalai Lama said in 1989. I like that quote, though I always thought of meditation as a conscious activity, whereas sleeping isn’t. But I recently came across a quote of the same scope. John Steinbeck said: “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it”. Now, I don’t know about you, but it happened to me more than once that I went to sleep with a clear question, trusting it to ‘the committee of sleep’ and waking up with an answer. Have you ever had such an experience? Deirdre Barrett Ph.D. wrote a book about this phenomenon entitled ‘The Committee of Sleep’. Want to find our more? Check here.
When you zoom in on things you’ll discover new details. When you zoom out, you’ll see the big picture. Both the details and the big picture provide you with new information: your frame of reference literally changes. Zooming in and out let’s you discover spaces that you didn’t know were there. It creates alternatives. It broadens your perspective and understanding and makes it possible to redefine what you are looking at and what that means to you. This redefinition should ultimately increase your effectiveness to deal with things. And if it doesn’t, well then you may want to zoom in or out some more.
I saw this text as a post on Facebook some time ago. And I’m guessing you did too, since we were all kindly asked to re-post it and so it probably went around the world. Still, what the message says is true. It is amazing how our mind works and that we’re able to read this text fairly easy, while in fact it’s a total mix up of letters and numbers. It proves just how creative and flexible our mind is when confronted with an apparent chaos. Take for instance this Cambridge University study that says: “Did you konw you’re a guiens? Jsut the fcat taht you can atllacuy raed tihs psot porves taht fcat. The huamn mnid is so pufowerl it can dcodee tihs txet eevn tguohh eervy sglnie wrod is slepled iocenrtclry. The one cavaet is taht the frist and lsat lertets are pervresed in erevy wrod. Cidrgbame Uitesirnvy cetoudncd a sduty and fnuod taht the biarn deos not raed eevry snlige lteetr, but wodrs as a wohle. It shows our mind is capable of bringing order to chaos; mixed-up words, but to life itself as well.
Whatever it is you want to do, you can think about that for days, weeks or even years. You can analyze it, make plans for it, come up with al kinds of strategies and theories. But it is until the moment you actually get into action, you’re not getting anywhere. In order to really get ahead, there is one simple thing you have to do. You have to get started.
What tunes will get the party started? That’s a question you can ask yourself every day, in every situation. You can wait for someone else to play some music, hoping that you’ll like it. But it’s your party, so you decide. Play whatever makes you feel good and dance your way through the day.
Bob Marley once said: “When one door is closed, don’t you know, another is open”. Every door is a gateway to opportunity. Even a closed door, for it sets you in motion one way or another. A door is a chance to explore, to enter a new space where you can meet new people, learn new things and what not. Even when that door seems unattractive to you at first, open it and a discovery can be made.
