The problem with manifestation gimmicks is sometimes they appear to work. If they never did, you wouldn’t beat yourself mercilessly when your personal ship of state appeared to float or sink.

Success now and again, even success a great deal of the time, doesn’t mean you figured it out, that you did it, or that you’re a success. It also doesn’t mean that you didn’t figure it out, you didn’t do what you needed to do, or that you’re a failure. It means that those times when you appeared to be a success, that was simply how it appeared to you.

In my world that means it couldn’t have been otherwise, that it was the quite natural unfolding of life. Life was going to do what it did regardless of what I appeared to do or not do. But that’s me. You do you.

We’re not good sometimes and bad others. We didn’t try harder when the result was good and not hard enough when the result was bad. It may appear that way, but it’s not true in my book.

What is a good result anyway? A good result is one that aligns with what I believe to be good. It might be bad, but I don’t see it that way. It’s the same with bad results. They might be good, but due to how I view the world it’s not good for me.

In essence, my ideas of good and bad are me trying to get this big bad world, this grand good world, to conform to my ideas of what is good and bad, and reject what every other being on the planet, except of course those who agree with me, wants to see happen.

If I could harness the world it would conform to my wishes alone and everyone else would have to get used to being disappointed. Now, that sounds a bit sociopathic, doesn’t it? People like that are easy to see, except when they’re me. They stand out like a big black storm cloud on a clear day.

Knowing that, most of us still want our own way. Some even have the power to force the issue. This need for our way to triumph seems to be a human glitch, but life is an expert at giving us both the good and the bad, only life doesn’t call it that. Life just calls it life.

When something good happens, enjoy it. Why not? Even when the result is good, most tend to wait for the proverbial other shoe to drop and that dulls the enjoyment. When something that seems bad happens, experience it. We’re going to experience it whether we like it or not. We’re going to feel it or feel our rejection of it, either way we’re at the effect of this it, whatever it is.

There is no escape.

That’s a big one. We spend our lives trying to escape the bad and experience only the good. Now answer me honestly. Has that worked? Ever? Maybe you’re better at this than me. I can honestly say it. has. never. worked. for. me.

We only think is has, that we’ve got the hang of it, once life moves onto the next experience, and it’s a good one. See — it works! Until life moves on again and it’s a bad one. Damn. I blew it.

Nothing lasts forever. You have proof of that. It’s your life. All things pass, the good and the bad, or said another way, life moves on. Life is change. The only given in life, is its movement from one experience to another with absolutely no guarantees of satisfaction, that is unless we’re okay with whatever happens. Then, it just is, one experience after another, no good, no bad, just characters on the stage of life, reading the script life gives us. Which by the way, we do regardless of whether we’re in the flow or swimming upstream. The only difference: the experience is slightly (okay, I might be understating here) more work when we’re swimming for all we’re worth against the current.

The headlines can’t be missed, so and so is a great success, so and so failed miserably. You probably have a few headlining the stories in your head. They might be from yesterday, a near miss that nearly wasn’t, a worry about tomorrow’s dreaded headline, god no, not that, or something that happened years ago, an epic fail stuck in time. Funny how the ones we remember are the failures, isn’t it.

But … what if they mean absolutely nothing other than the meaning we give them, and what if we gave them no meaning at all?

If we have any power, it is the power we have with words. Words are power. We determine our lives with the stories we write, with the headlines we post, with our ideas of good and bad, failure and success … and they are all ideas, or at least they are in my glorious mess of a world. Whether they are in yours, is your story.

Thankfully, each of us is constantly writing and editing our story. Life is storytelling, the play of ideas and concepts. The story never ends, perhaps not even once this form passes into legend. It’s always up for a nip and tuck, a tiny rewrite to tweak or one that upends the entire storybook.

How much of your story are you willing to set free? Will you erase the last few lines, wipe out a chapter or two and start again, or go for it and set aside everything you think you know and start with a stack of blank pages. You’re writing it, not the events themselves, but the meaning you give them.

And that’s not about anyone but you …


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Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY