You Could Always Stand On Your Head
See things differently.
Arranging a bowl of daffodils for a family party wasn’t turning out how I wanted it to. All the beautiful faces of the daffodils were facing downward. I thought how silly it was that to see the flowers, everyone would have to sit under the table and look up at them.
“Then turn them over instead,” came the idea. I flipped all the flowers over, and they looked up at me.
If daffodils giggle (and who says they don’t), I was looking at a bowl of giggling yellow and white faces, open to being seen and admired.
Later, at the party, holding our grandson as he looked at the room one way and wasn’t happy with what he saw, I flipped him around and said, “Let’s look at it this way,” and immediately, he was happy with the different view.
One time, my mom told me a story about something the management of the place she lived in had decided to do. She was very upset about it.
I suggested we look at it another way. What if she owned the building and had costs and people to watch over? What choice would she make? At that moment, she chose a different view and let go of the upset.
Shifts of thought are so easy to do and yet so easy not to do because we are accustomed to our old viewpoints.
However, when we remember that every thought and action is choreographing what we experience as our world, then looking at everything differently is the most important thing we can do.
Shifting our perception and changing our viewpoint are the only things we can control and the only things that will make a permanent difference.
Listening to most people who call themselves world leaders, don’t we all have moments when we want to take them by the scruff of their necks and drag them into our real lives?
Since so many of them seem unable to imagine a reality different from their own, perhaps a few weeks or months on the street with a minimum-wage job would shake their points of view to ones with more empathy and understanding.
The trouble is, if they have not decided to see things differently, this reaction on our part might only entrench them deeper into their limited belief systems.
Therefore, we must recognize that each of us is, in reality, a world leader. The media faces who may call themselves world leaders but who live and act from the viewpoint of duality and greed are not.
This means that we all need to examine our entrenched points of view and open up to changing them.
We must ensure that we consider that there is always another side (or sides) and that we can encompass, understand, and have compassion for those who think differently than we do.
>We are the ones who can see the threads of Life that bind us all together.
>We are the ones who recognize that everyone has a different spiritual path to follow and that one path is not better than another.
>We are the ones who know that all paths, eventually, lead us back to the divine Intelligence of Love.
If we want to arrive at that understanding and awareness sooner, then we are the ones who must recognize that it is our thoughts, ideas, and viewpoints that have to be shifted first before we can expect others to shift theirs.
We can make it hard, or we can make it easy. It just took a moment to turn the daffodils over, and it only took a second to see a different view of the room.
All it takes is practice and building the shift habit.
Try it on anything and everything, big and small.
Tell yourself, “Let’s look at it this way,” and see what happens.
Here’s a book that will help: The Four Essential Questions: Choosing Spiritually Healthy Habits.