Ah the close of another day, one filled with little moments of grace, strength and protection, love of family and canine companions, wonderful spring sunshine and flowers and flowering shrubs and trees opening to the spring sun and rains. Let’s see, what can I find to be grateful for?
I am grateful for optimism. I hadn’t really considered myself much of an optimist. Though by no means have I ever considered myself a cynic, I placed myself somewhere around realist pragmatist tending a little toward pessimism. But oddly it has been through the hard times of the past 12 to 15 months that I have found an almost ridiculous sense of optimism. My new motto has become, “We’ll figure it out.” It usually has to do with something that’s going to require financial means that at that moment I’m not quite sure we have or where we’re going to get it. It used to be my way of stalling because I really had no idea how we were going to do whatever it was that needed to be done. But that simple statement of faith has tended to become reality. We have figured it out on many occasions. Many days it hasn’t been pretty, but it’s been present, and that’s all that matters.
This is not magical thinking. Every time I’ve said, “We’ll figure it out” we did just that; thinking through/taking action on ideas and strategies to do whatever “it” was that needed to be worked/figured out. Put more plainly, we didn’t wait around for something to happen, we figured it out. If that meant asking someone for help, I asked. If it meant figuring out a different way of doing something or deciding what we could do without to help us save what we needed, we did that. So “we’ll figure it out” has become a sort of optimistic self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s definitely something I plan to keep working on.
Neuroscientists believe that we can actually “sculpt” our brains; that when we put our minds toward thinking a certain way we can alter our brains and all kinds of things around us. (I have to do much more reading on this so I sound a bit more articulate about it than I am right now.) A group of neuroscientists have spent time studying spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama and others and are learning that people who spend time in meditation particularly those cultivating compassion toward others activate certain centers in the brain that bring about a lasting sense of wellbeing. I am all for sculpting my brain by being mindful and intentional about the things I am putting my mental and emotional energy toward. Rather than expending it in anxious fretting about what were going to do or how we’re going to get out of a difficult situation, etc. I can choose to say with a sense of hope and optimism, backed by appropriate action (“right effort”) “we’ll figure it out” and expect that’s exactly what’s going to happen. So far it seems to be working.
I said the other day that practicing gratitude is like lifting weights–as we get stronger we add heavier weights and get stronger (and more sculpted). Likewise cultivating optimism, generosity, compassion, joy, equanimity and other attributes require exercise. Much of this begins with the intentions we hold. When I intend to be more grateful, optimistic, generous, compassionate, joyous, equanimous, etc. and take steps that move me in those directions, I can’t help but strengthen myself in those areas. I am slowwwwwlllllyyyy moving toward a place of deepening this understanding and just barely scratching the surface of cultivating a meditation practice that will take me where I want to go. For now I am very much in the “figure it out stage” in this and so many other areas of my life. What I am learning very clearly is that panicking is a waste of energy and time. Saying to myself, even when I barely believed it, “this is going to work out” has happened almost every time. And when what I wanted didn’t work out in the way I had originally wanted it to, it sometimes turned out better than I’d planned.
If you’d have told me I’d be at a place where almost every day is an adventure or a mystery waiting to unfold rather than a systematic, organized, I-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next phenomenon, I’d have said you were crazy, that I didn’t know how to live spontaneously and carefree particularly around important matters like relationships, employment, and finances. But I am learning a lot about planning without being attached to the plans or the outcomes, that it is alright to not know what’s going to happen or what needs to happen next. Because when things don’t go exactly as planned or something unexpected comes up that throws everything up in the air, I’m learning to say, “That’s okay, we’ll figure it out.”
© M. T. Chamblee, 2012
