I think most of us can agree that the universe is screwier than Obama’s birth certificate. We’re just going along minding our own business, slogging through life as best we can, keeping our heads down and our fingers crossed – but still the universe will find some way of tripping us up. Right?
You wake up, have a great cup of coffee, the sun is shining, you have a fresh pack of smokes and traffic is light. Great. But then you get to work and discover that there is a power outtage and you failed to print out that report that was due today on Friday before you left for the weekend? Or the parking lot is under construction so you have to park on the street three blocks from the office and run back and forth all day to feed the meter? Or your co-worker just got laid off and you have double the workload with no increase in pay and you are likely going to be putting in extra hours at work just to keep up. Sound familar?
After a while too, we start to train ourselves to expect this sort of thing. The classic Murphy’s Law applies here: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” My father had his own version “Hope for the best but expect the worst” I’m sure there are hundreds of variations of this view and all of them came out of the need to be prepared for disaster when and if it strikes. To expect problems and have a backup solution handy just makes sense. Right? Maybe not.
I’ve thought about this lately – in my case I’ve been traveling the universe for months looking for a home. A place where I can truly unpack my belongings and stay there a while. This goal has eluded me and has been a game of cat and mouse and frankly it’s really sucked. I definitely felt a victim of the universe. Nightly I would implore God, “What do I have to do to find a home?” or something like that. Never feeling I got an answer.
But then I started to wonder if I was making it happen somehow. I was creating all of this temporary living stuff without meaning to. No, I’m not talking about the Secret, where my mind was putting out some weird negative thought and because I was all wrapped up in it I got it. I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about the fact that this freeking universe is bass-ackwards. I’m talking about a trick you need to know in order to somehow survive this obstacle course of life. I’m talking about the fact that the uinverse is rigged. Yup. Rigged.
Whoever created this circus ride called life thought it would be tre’s funny to just make everything go in opposites. Like, if you want something then that means you’ll never get it. The more you pray, desire, crave, covet, etc. the further away it gets from you. Like a magnet in reverse – it just won’t stick. Conversely whatever you don’t want you can get in spades. You dont’ want to be stuck in traffic, so you leave early and voila, there is an accident that sticks you in traffic for 3 hours. You don’t want the object of your affection to leave you and boom, he decides he wants to see other people. You don’t want to gain weight so you stop eating, your metabolism slows and now no matter what you eat, you gain weight. Stuff like that, yes?
So, what’s the solution? To try to trick the universe by pretending you don’t want what you want? Or by pretending you do want the things you don’t want? Wow, that seems complicated, doesn’t it? And what a lot of mental exhaustion you could incur that way. No…I don’t think that would work – at least not with any consistent results. I think the answer is indifference. Let me explain.
Have you ever noticed that when you really don’t care – how things turn out that things turn out pretty good? It’s not that you’re in apathy and don’t want things to turn out well, it’s more that you’re kind of above it – you’ve decided what you want, how you’re going to get it, the actions you need to take to bring it about and then you just go about your business. You don’t spend two hours a day visualizing it. You don’t amass magazines, construction paper and glue to create ‘story boards’ of it. You just say, “I want this to happen” and then you forget about it. Send it out there and just go about your business. Next thing you know it happens or you get it and you’re even a little suprised by the fact that you didn’t have to ‘work’ it.
I think when things do happen this way it’s because it does trick the universe. You aren’t out there sending it messages of what you must have, must get, must accomplish – in fact, you’re sending it no messages at all. So it has no choice but to give you things. It can’t help itself. It has to give things and you won’t play its game, so you win.
Don’t know if I’m right or wrong but I do think I’m onto something here because this almost always turns out to be true for me, anyway. Why not try it? Just say, ‘oh I want this, and this and this’ and then forget about it. Go about your business. Then be surprised when it happens. Because there is nothing better than nice surprises, huh?
