People say that someone’s journal is a private affair, and by and large I agree. If you’ve ever kept one before, when have you not gone off on someone who has wronged you, or called someone annoying, or wished them go to Hell, go directly to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars? You know. We record private and intimate observations, and sometimes we call people names.
That said, as I was drinking my morning coffee yesterday and flipping back through some past entries, I came across one from 2017 that I wrote on my birthday, October 20. As a general rule, I do not consider my journal entries in any way special; most contain the repeat language we use to mark our passage through this world, as in “I got up this morning and my coffee tasted like dirt.” “My head feels like an inflated balloon today; why did I drink that fourth double martini?,” things like that. While I find myself inspired on occasion, most of my journal entries are anything but a paragon of beautiful writing.
What struck me about this particular entry was the foresight, the way it announced and even predicted changes that hadn’t taken place at the time, but now have. I could feel them coming. I did not know when or how they would arrive, but some part of me felt that they would happen, even knew it. Here is a sample:
“I feel such monumental change is coming that we can hardly say in six months I will still be hosting trips for this travel
club, or even attempting to sell luxury group cruises. I feel that something else awaits. Everything–perspectives,
ideas–will shift in the tropical heat.”
Whether or not you have had a similar experience, I find it is worth taking time to appreciate our own foresight, our capacity for actively ordering our experience. We literally call it into being, and we underestimate our power. We do not give ourselves enough credit for being able to shape our own realities. Instead we believe we fall victim to circumstances beyond our control, things that toss us about like garbage dumped into the ocean and carried in every direction by the waves. We get sick and believe somehow it just “happened” to us. We hate our job and secretly wish for it to end, or we enjoy our job sometimes but find the bullshit beyond annoying, then guess what? Somebody fires us. Also, when we see changes coming, rather than embrace them we fall back into useless patterns of behavior where we busily try to avoid what we wished into being in the first place, where we waste our creative and emotional energies in a frenzy of distraction–work, our Twitter feeds, TV, etc. So powerful are we that if we wish for something hard enough and long enough, it shows up in our experience. We think about things, and they literally become our reality. This actually happens; it is not some New Age dogma propounded solely by hippies smoking weed. If we dismiss this ability, we leave our power untapped. Here is another example of how, in October, I thought I was simply writing in my journal one morning, but in reality was calling things into being:
“I have known many people who said they wouldn’t hit their stride until their forties. For me, that may be my
late forties or even fifties. Who can say? I will just remain patient, and do as instructed. I think we can safely say,
though, that a game-changing shift is taking place, and the answers are arriving.”
In my situation, I ordered up a clean slate. Lo and behold, I have one. It is funny to think just how clearly I knew all this in October. Of course, being a human being with a Twitter feed, a cell phone, and all the distractions of modern life, which for me included delicious micheladas in Mazatlán, I allowed myself to get carried away, but the process was already in motion. The train had left the station. The clean slate was on its way. If you would like one, too, you can create one. The changes you wish to make don’t have to be as large as a new career or new place of residence, but if you want to envision big things, why not? We can’t stay stuck in our old ruts forever.
