Tag Archives: Creation

Sustained extreme happiness

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Here’s another excerpt from Easy – Deconstructing the Art of Effortless Creation. It comes after all the stuff about making the practical aspects of life easy: projects, time, possessions, etc, and encapsulates my vision and hope for the deeper side of life…

First edit is complete. Thinking about publication early July.

Chapter 45 Sustained Extreme Happiness

There’s one more chapter I want to add before the end. It doesn’t quite come into the category of making life easy, but it is certainly important for making life worthwhile.

The last few months have been rough ones for me. That thing I alluded to about adding unnecessary complexity to my relationships and emotions has been playing out on a massive scale.

Now, I know that I create whatever I want in life; I choose how I feel, how I respond to the things that happen around me, the circumstances of my life. So for a long time I asked myself: why would I choose grief? Why would I choose pain when I could choose happiness and peace. I know they exist; I know I could create them. So why not?

But somehow, the idea of “happiness” just didn’t attract me. After the intensity of the everyday experience I was creating with my grief, how could mere happiness compare?

In common human experience, there are two experiences we associate with vivid happiness: new love and new babies. All other forms, as far as I could remember, tended to deliver a much milder form. Nothing special. Nothing wildly exciting. And that’s what I craved.

Then I stopped myself. I recognised a semantic pattern, a resignation to something just because it was common in the status quo. I was assuming that just because sustained extreme happiness was not common in the world, I could not create it. But of course I could.

So here I am, having formed the idea of sustained extreme happiness. People I tell about it respond sceptically at best. There’s the caution of someone confronted with mania, fearing the depression which traditionally follows.

But why shouldn’t I create this? We see prolonged grief all the time. I myself have lived it, brilliantly, for months on end. Why not flip the coin, live the other side. The intensity is possible, we all know that; it’s just the flavour that would be different.

Having seen the vision, I’m certain it’s possible. Having chosen it for myself, and, by contagion, for the people around me, I am sure it’s on its way. There are clear moments of it already, glimpses of how it looks in reality, how it feels, how it is.

I’m eager to see the form it takes longer term, the circumstances of life that form around the central emotional experience. Life is already pretty good here: close relationships, physical expression, beautiful environment, work I love, plenty of time and money, and vibrant good health.

What more is possible? Watch this space.



Hate and Love

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Let’s consider for a moment the idea that creation and destruction, hate and love are not opposites, they are the same. Contrasting sides to the same coin, one implicitly holding the fact of the other.

It gives us a beautiful way forward through the things we are resisting, if we see that the things we want to change hold the absolute truth of the things we want to create.

I love being with people who are angry, who are taking huge grief and spinning it into wild destruction, either outwardly or within their own lives, because I see so clearly the bedrock of love and connection that is witnessed through the destruction.

They could not be as they are without the seeds of huge passion, huge love, huge hope, even. Somewhere in their anguished attempts to hurt and revenge is a vision of something entirely different, entirely opposite. They see the possibility of wild, enormous love, and ache at its apparent absence in their lives and in the world.

These are the people we can learn from.

It is numbness that saddens me, the world of small lives, where imagination is stifled in favour of conformity, where people are taught to toe the line, as if a row of identical workers could create the world we see as possible. They can’t. At best, they can keep us on our current trajectory, wherever that may lead.

My vision is to listen to the impassioned, to admire them, love them, hear what they have to say. We may need to wait through some ranting, some fearful scenarios, some recounting of woeful wrongs; and these we can learn from, also, if we’re truly listening for the nuggets of gold that pepper the diatribe.

My experience is that once people who haven’t felt heard feel heard; once those who haven’t felt respected feel respected, once they experience someone who can stay with them, accept them, love them, something alters – their ideas shift and come to the forefront; their anger becomes possibility and love, and something totally new opens up in front of them, something that will benefit us all.

Let’s play with the idea that passion is good, always, that it just needs channeling to become something wonderful, beautiful and new.

It may be that the coin needs flipping, but really, how hard is it to flip a coin?



Peaceful ready, versus impatient ready

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Sometimes when we have a sense of big changes happening, of huge new things to come for us, we can get furiously impatient waiting for them to happen – this is what goes on for me, at least: I start looking for signs, for evidence of progress, for the next step on the ladder to climb.

I’m beginning to realise this isn’t the way it works. The way life flows now, progress isn’t linear, it doesn’t follow a clear, step-by-step pattern. When things happen, they appear out-of-the-blue, in a way I could never have imagined or planned for – but the fact that they do happen is not a surprise, because I’ve seen them in visions beforehand.

So why the impatience? When I’ve seen so much evidence of life unfolding in this way, why don’t I just trust it, why don’t I have faith? – because patience isn’t impatience’s opposite; the opposite of impatience is faith.

Today I’ve come to see this in a new way, to look back over my life and see that it has often been in the quiet moments that great things have come.

There will be no evidence of progress, and I have to be okay with that.

So today, despite extreme temptation to impatience, I am calm, peaceful, trusting.

Great things are coming, and I’m peacefully ready.

Experiential learning

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way we learn and grow – in particular, about the power of story to transform in a way that learning a step by step process doesn’t.

Why is this?

The answer I’ve come up with – whether it’s true or not – is that experience, actual experience or through reading or watching the experience of others, happens in the whole body, whereas learning a process happens in the mind, and only slowly translates into new action, if it does at all.

I’ve learned lots from books over the years, and gradually I’ve been able to translate new ideas and new processes into the way I live my life.

It’s the stories I’ve read or heard, however – the anecdotes in the self-help books, the real life stories told from the stage, the mystical metaphors of Harry Potter and other vibrantly alive fiction – that have made the biggest, fastest change.

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