“I am not bound to succeed but I am bound to live up to the light I have.”
Abraham Lincoln
I was launching a new project at work and excitedly told a friend all about it. Her answer set me thinking and has stayed with me a long time. She said, “be careful not to attach yourself to any outcome. It will be tough to manifest if your expectations come in the way.”
Now, I admit I had heard this in many different ways, but one part of me fought hard against it…” why shouldn’t I want to strive for a successful outcome? I mean I’ve worked so hard for this project” argued my rational left brain. It didn’t make sense. Though after pondering over it some more I figured that it doesn’t mean that I sit around and wait for my dreams to land on my doorstep but that I take an intentional, passion-filled action.
It’s important to understand that your happiness doesn’t lie on the other side of a job, a boy/girlfriend or a proposal. It exists right now inside you. And the more you realise and practice this the easier it is for your desire to find you.
Then, just as I was pondering over this, quite mysteriously, a story I’d heard some time ago popped into my head.
There’s this guy who’s passion is to catch and collect the most unusual butterflies. He sees a mesmerising, golden brown coloured super butterfly and runs outside to catch it. He chases it round and about, over and over, puts up a net and tries everything…he just has to have it! Finally out of breath and exhausted, he sits down on his patio, sweaty and dejected. Moments later the butterfly slowly approaches him, flies around his head and settles on his nose!
In the culture I grew up I heard this all my life, “what you want will find it’s way to you”! How much more evident could it get? Yet because of our conditioning we are programmed to expect a specific outcome and we channel all our stress and anxiety towards it. By doing so we actually make the outcome less likely to happen. We push it away, distance it from us.
The gurus say that taking inspired action is where it’s at.
We all want to taste success and we spend our lives chasing after what we want. Maybe what we really want is to feel that we are doing the best we can, not necessarily to succeed but to feel worthy…and that way ironically we are more likely to succeed.
What if we were to shift our minds to a place of patience, to complete peace and acceptance with whatever outcome occurs. That would be the right environment for what we want to attract to ourselves and awaken it within us.
Spiritual wisdom tells us that our desires are co-created by the universe as in Rumi’s quote, “What you seek is seeking you.” To my understanding this means that we need to be in complete peace with whatever the universe serves us.
I know that not everything I do happens the way I want it to and occasionally I tend to get attached to an expectation, but then, I’m a work in progress….and while I can’t turn back time and undo some unconscious mistakes, I care enough to learn and improve going forward.
Cheers!
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