Creative What-ifs

Last week my sister-in-law told me about a shop that might consign my bracelets and so yesterday I went to the store. It is a wonderful store that sells a combination of flowers and art: Arcadia Flower and Art Market in the strip mall at 40th Street and Indian School. Newly opened and overflowing with the joy and vision of people who have jumped head first into living their dream, I was enchanted by the store and the people. I was even more enchanted when they took my entire inventory which means that I can concentrate on my writing and enjoy making the bracelets without the stress of figuring out how to sell them.

While I was showing my bracelets one of the employees looked at them and said "you actually have the patience to do that?" "Do what ?" "Sort those buttons and then sew them into bracelets." "Oh, yes" I said, "I love buttons and I love being able to create with them."

Actually, when he asked me the question I was reminded that a friend I had not seen in at least a decade came to one of my shows and she looked at the bracelets and then looked at me and said "I just can't picture the Mary I knew years ago as being someone who would make these. I just never pictured you doing something like this."

Actually, the Mary from years ago would not have been able to create the bracelets I now make. What I am aware of is that the Mary of fifteen years ago contained the creativity and ability to make the bracelets but she had not yet learned how to expand her boundaries of self to include a much larger idea of the unknown. I believe most of us spend so much time worrying about the unknowns of living that we keep the 'unknowns' of self firmly tamped down; I mean who wants to be blindsided by their own self when it requires so much psychic energy to be alert to the unknowns of living! As I wrote about in The Unexploded Shell, much of our life we keep our true self tightly clutched deeply inside against the 'what ifs' of living. Unfortunately, although this unconscious behavior may allow us to feel safe, it also keeps us from truly living. But there is a way to use what-ifs to expand our living and make new and wonderful discoveries. You can actually 'trick' your mind into creatively using what-if.

First of all, your mind likes 'what-ifs' because your mind insists upon organizing reality. This ability of the mind to organize elements of reality, that is to 'sort' possibilities of what is or could happen, is a mental function that allows us to participate in living as it directs our behavior. And here's the trick of this natural function: you can either take control of it or just let it organize your life according to it's very limited view. If you let your 'mind' just do what it wants while you remain a bystander to your own life {i.e., unconscious} then your 'mind', understanding that survival is the base-line or first goal of living, will simply sort the possibilities of life into 'safe' and 'not safe' which is how it views life when left to it's own devices. But it doesn't stop there! Since most of us live lives that the great majority of the time have very limited true {that is based in the reality of right now} survival needs and since just surviving is kind of boring, a mind that is unconsciously operating on a 'survival' setting, then orients itself to pleasure.

If a person is unconsciously simply going through the mechanics of living: engaging tasks, responsibilities and chores of living because they have to, then the mind operates from the perspective that it is simply 'surviving' and as an antidote to this kind of boredom points in the direction of survival's polar opposite: pleasure. When pleasure is desired as the antidote to surviving then the achievement or experience of pleasure is not terribly satisfying. Pleasure indicates something 'pleasant' so why wouldn't the experience of pleasure in this instance to satisfying? Because pleasure that is simply the other side of surviving the day, is based only my own needs: I want to feel good; I want approval; I want to be cared for; I want someone to pay attention to me; I want, I want, I want .....

When we find ourselves bouncing between the boredom of survival and then gratifying ourselves with fleeting pleasures: drinking, shopping, gambling, eating, emotionally disconnected sex, or vegetating without purpose in front of the TV or game or movie videos or the computer we have, without realizing it, oriented ourselves to a 'fixed point' of self-centered loneliness. This 'fixed point' is actually the vision we have unconsciously created about the purpose of living.

Remember how I said that the mind instinctively organizes reality? Well, even though we may be unconscious of the hows and whys of sorting methods, the mind is not doing all this sorting in a completely random manner, nor is it operating without your input. We actually give it hints all the time of how it is to organize reality. The hints of how the mind should sort elements of living into piles comes from our thoughts. Our thoughts crystallize into attitudes: this is the nature of thinking, to become a form or structure to operate from and that structure with regard to our self, is called an attitude.

Our thoughts are not like a bunch of gnats that just fly around and annoy us, they are actually much more like honeybees that fly with purpose and function from highly organized hives. If our mind did not organize thoughts into attitudes then we would be overwhelmed by the sheer chaotic magnitude of what our mind, left to it's own devices, does: all day long it buzzes along churning out thoughts. And so, if we get stuck in thoughts of an 'I want ... I want ... I want' self, then our thoughts tend to be mostly about me and how people, places and things are treating me and the resulting attitude that frames our vision of living tends to be one of self pity. Self pity, then depending upon our personality, then either emits an attitude of either self pity or resentment (hostility) both of which just generate more thoughts of I want .... I want ... I want ... and the focusing attitude gets stuck.

It is the job of attitudes to frame life so we have a reference point which is what I called earlier, our fixed point or our 'vision' of what living is all about. This vision is what is called our perception of reality. Perception simply refers to the 'lens' that we see life through. We create our lens for viewing life by what we tell ourselves, in other words, by our thoughts. You see, it's all just a big circle: thoughts become attitudes; attitudes create the frame or structure of the perception of reality; perception creates the lens we see life through.

If it is your thoughts that create your vision of life, why not manage your thoughts so the framework that is created is one that establishes a sense of 'I am' that is creative? Because that 'fixed point' or vision that I referred to is actually your sense of 'I am' and the creation of 'I am' is the big, really BIG choice we are able to make in life. And, if you do not consciously make a choice of the vision you want for your 'I am', then your survival mind will make it for you. And one way to consciously create your own vision is with the creative use of 'what if'.

Creatively using what your mind wants to mess around with anyway, the what-ifs of life, is a short-cut in many ways to managing your thoughts and simultaneously expanding the boundaries of the idea of your self. I call this the 'what if I believed ...' tactic and if I'm having a problem, instead of focusing on the problem, I look for the other side of the problem and focus on the solution by asking myself what if I believed .... and insert, the answer to the problem.

This tactic of creatively using 'what if' in my life was actually first put into play thirty some years ago without my understanding what was happening. When I entered a recovery program based on living one day at a time, the creative 'what if' was: if I admit that I am alcoholic and powerless over alcohol THEN what if I believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity one day at a time. The program doesn't use the phrase 'what if' but that is exactly what is occurring: a change of perception of myself from someone who is completely out of control with regard to drinking to a person who could not drink just for today because a power greater than myself is restoring me.

The concept of just for today works very powerfully with using what-if in a creative manner because it expands the boundaries of the self safely. The issue of 'safety' is always going to be primary with our survival-ego-self and life is much, much simpler if we are able to just accept that and deal with it's reality. The problem that most of us run into when we wish to change a habit that we have come to understand is causing us pain in life is that we want to jump from the realization to recovery in about 24 hours. Won't work. The word 'habit' indicates a way of behaving or thinking that we are really, really good at: we're habituated.

Our mind has no 'morals' about being habituated in that it does not care if our thoughts or attitudes are good for us or not: if we keep doing them then that's 'who we are' as far as our mind is concerned. And to be honest, as long as we remain unconscious, that's as far as the concern of our mind will go. This is a common mistake of perception that virtually all of us have which is that if we have habituated a thought or action then it must be good because it is mine. When put that attitude on paper in words it's easy to see the fallacy of the belief but when we're feeling them, our eight-year-old is in charge and the attitude of the eight-year-old is 'my way or the highway.'

[Actually where I learned to 'see' what I believe or more accurately, what that eight-year-old inside me believes, was by journaling. The 'magic' of putting our thoughts on paper is that we actually 'see' with some objectivity rather than just 'feeling' what is occurring in our lives. When journaling is done regularly it is possible to begin to see the structure or vision of living that our thoughts create.]

So, you might be asking about now, what does all of this have to do with buttons becoming bracelets? The creation of the bracelets came about because I had lived using creative what-ifs for long enough so that is how I tend to orient myself to life. First of all, I deliberately choose each day the "I am' I intend to live from. For over a year now I have lit a candle each morning with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I am the organ through which the Spirit executes it's will and creative power."

I made a deliberate decision a little more than a year ago that those words would be my 'fixed point' - the vision of belief for my life. By choosing a deliberate "I am" I'm giving my thoughts and mind an intention to focus it's sorting of the elements of reality: I am choosing the 'what if' that I will sort from. I deliberately 'yield' to the goodness when I light the candle. I believe that the purpose of each person's life is creative power: the creation of new life through a being that has never existed before: you and I. I light the candle and go into the day with the focus 'what if' the creative power of Life is moving through me, then what do I see - what is my 'lens' for life today? My intention is that my life is one of creative living - which is what I am if I am the organ through which the Creative Power of Life is executed - and that is a sharing of the best of myself with life. Creativity is the giving of your best self to life. And as long as one day at a time, I deliberately focus my 'lens' on this intention then my thoughts revolve around this idea.

When my fixed point, my vision of self is as an organ of creative power then all the elements of life are simply the 'what ifs' of creativity: what happens if I combine this with that? What happens if I choose this thought? What happens if I consider using my grandmother's buttons to make bracelets for my sisters? What happens if instead of brushing that thought away with the habituated attitude: I don't sew, I stay with it and add that idea to the belief that the creative power of the Spirit if flowing through me. Maybe I'll just add those two ideas together and let them sit. And so I let them sit and the next idea comes: 'you could use that bracelet as a template, just get some ribbon and thread.' And so creatively I say, what-if I sew the buttons onto ribbon? What happens is that my concept of self expanded past it's self imposed boundaries of "can't, do not have, never have, tried once before & didn't work."

And I did sew the buttons onto ribbon, and I figured out how to back it and create clasps and in the last eight months I have gotten better and better at creating button bracelets and people actually pay money for them! But even more importantly by saying yes to a creative what-if, I discovered a whole part of myself that had been sleeping for about fifty years. All it took to wake that part of self up was to change a habituated thought 'I'm not creative in that way' with the deliberate choice to say each day {actually several times a day} "I am the organ through which the Spirit executes its will and creative power." And by golly, one day at a time, I am in fact the organ through which the Spirit executes its will and creative power!