When It Comes To Making Plans

Flow Like Fire

During one of our early morning talks in the dark, Del, with his coffee, and I, with my tea, watched the fire burning in our stove.

The fire was doing something we had never seen before.

It would quiet down so that all that we saw were very hot logs, and then a spurt or whiff of fire would rise and immediately blink out, as the entire roof of the stove would suddenly be alive with flame.

Within moments, the fire would quiet down and repeat itself, but never the same way twice.

Fire is like that. It is never the same way twice. Yet its essence is always the same.

Everyone knows fire when they see it, even though it has infinite ways to express itself.

This made me think of plans and making lists.

Yes, I know that, on the surface, it appears to be a strange connection.

But just a moment before, we were talking about plans and lists, and the fire’s show that morning was the perfect symbol of the difference between how we think things should be and what actually happens.

I thought, “What if we were more like fire when we made plans and lists?”

Instead of saying, “This is exactly how my day, my work, my party, my dinner, my life—my anything—is going to go,” what if we accepted that the essence of our plans will always be perfect and then let the outcome be expressed in a variety of interesting and, yes, beautiful ways?

What if we flowed like fire?

Then, instead of feeling remorse, guilt, anger, or emotion of any kind when our plans do not go as we expect or we don’t finish our to-do lists, we flowed like fire and lived within the awareness of the beauty and uniqueness of each moment.

What if we saw ourselves as unique expressions of consciousness instead of limited humans?

Then, no matter what happens, we would be aware of our innate, individual perfection of being.

When we study fire, it is easy to see that no matter its shape, it remains fire.

We can see the same thing with anything in nature. A tree remains a tree, and a squirrel remains a squirrel.

When we get to ourselves, we often lose this essential awareness.

We think that if we haven’t done this or that, or our situation is not as planned, we have been impacted and become someone else.

However, the Truth is that we remain who we have been and always will be.

Even if we don’t know who we are, it doesn’t change who we are.

As we let go of expectations, fears, and judgments, our view of ourselves begins to clear.

When that happens, we often think we have changed, but we haven’t.

Instead, we have begun to see the face of our fire, the truth of our being.

In his excellent book, The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield states that we must always be about our work.

Yes, we must. Just as fire must always be doing fire, we must do who we are.

But if we measure that idea in human, linear, and stilted terms, we miss the fact that when we are aware of the essence of ourselves, like fire, then whatever we are doing is our work.

I love making lists and plans. I have a list on my computer that I check every hour. I have plans for today and plans for next year.

However, if my plans change at the next moment or month, it will not change who I am.

And if I don’t let emotions cloud my awareness, it will also not change the quality of my day or life.

As we strip off expectations and judgments and discover the infinite ways that we express the essence of our being, we discover that we have always been an individual expression of the Divine Mind.

We are like the fire.

The only real plan of fire is to be fire.

Like fire, we flow into and as our lives in infinite ways, always remaining ourselves.

We will become increasingly aware of this fact when we let joy guide us and gratitude light our flame.

Then, our lives become what they are—a spectacular show of infinite expression—never the same, always beautiful.

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