Important Conversations

There are a lot of important conversations you participate in during your lifetime.  Talking with parents and family members helps us learn the skills to grow up successfully.  Conversing with friends adds fun and spice and balance to those sometimes hard to learn lessons of family.  In due time we also speak with teachers, coaches, employers, congregants in our church, neighbors, those we encounter in charity work, service people... and the list could go on.  As humans we have a lot of interaction with each other.

But perhaps the most important and most neglected conversation is the one we have with our self.  What does that inner voice say to us?  Does it tell us we are capable and acceptable?  Or does it always tell us we aren't enough?  And just what drives that inner voice?

If it isn't helping us obtain the reality we want , can the message that voice delivers be changed?  How do we change it?  What kind of personal revolution might that start in our life?

Consider this quote from Neale Donald Walsch:  "What we call “reality” is a circle... Perspective creates perception, perception creates belief, belief creates behavior, behavior creates experience, experience creates “reality,” and “reality,” in turn, creates our next perspective."

Today I'm trying to have one of those important conversations with myself and if I used the scale represented in the picture above, I'm tentatively standing on the "How Do I Do It?" step.  In a broad sense my conversation is about economics.  My financial situation is getting to a critical point... I need an income flow to cover basic life sustaining necessities like food and shelter.  At the same time, I desperately do not want to go back to the corporate world of work.  Over the past 6 months I've tried several different things to generate a bit of self-produced income and they've been utter and abysmal failures.  I'm struggling to find the lesson in that and not just perceive it as I am a failure.

How do I change that from a destructive perception to a positive one that will let me move forward with purpose and success?  How do I turn my perceived lack into a perception of abundance?  Abundance implies plenty to give away...  Can I believe that I have anything to give?   And if I can find a way to believe it, do I have the inner faith to do it?

It's not that I'm seeking to be rich.  What society sees as wealth is a burden in and of itself that I don't wish to carry.  Monetarily all I'm interested in is enough to let me live in simplicity.  Money is a tool, an item to trade for things we need and want, a way of keeping score in the absurd game we play and call life.  More doesn't bring happiness.  It's a matter of having enough... and recognizing what is enough.  So for now I'm going to go outside and enjoy some mid-March sunshine and physical labor doing garden prep while I count the many blessings I do enjoy.  And even though I'm still worried about making the mortgage on April 1, I'm going to let sunshine, hard work, and the life I have be enough.

That's the important conversation I'm having with myself today.