Last week I drove to Ocala and stopped to get gas on Highway 40 just east of I-95. I never pay much attention to the price of gas, and locally just buy it where it’s on the way. But being in an unfamiliar place, I was all eyes and ears, taking it all in. I thought I remembered gas being over $3.00 a gallon not that long ago and yet here I was paying a dollar less than that per gallon. I thought, “how cool is that!”
I had to go inside for my receipt and I asked the clerk, “are gas prices changing?” She said yes, it had just gone up 14c a gallon and she was going on and on about the price increase, and the government greed and the economy… I thought, that’s one good thing about staying out of the loop: here I was excited thinking about how gas prices had gone so far down, yet she – who had obviously been following it all in detail for years – was aggravated it had just gone up 14c a gallon.
And I’m not completely in the dark about the news, of course. I see what AOL flashes in front of me when I sign on to check email. Every so often I’ll skim the headlines in Florida Today online. But I don’t get tied up in the details or the updates and I never watch it on tv. And I do that for a reason.
The reason is, when I start listening to the news, then I start vibrating there. If I allow myself to get drawn into their theories and opinions, and none of them are hopeful or optimistic, I may get curious about what they say and why they are saying it. Then I may I start looking for more evidence that it’s true or false, either researching online or talking to friends about it. None of these things are helpful to me and doing this simply makes me attract what everyone else is attracting. Which is not what I want.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Last week at Chevron I saw the gas prices and was pretty stoked, and the clerk complained about it. Just a difference in perception. She’d been schooled to know all the details of the gas prices as they fluctuated. I was just someone who bought gas and didn’t follow prices.
My ignorance served me very well in the moments I spent at the pump filling my tank that day. I thought about how great that prices had gone down so far. I felt hopeful about the economy and the new administration. I brought to mind the half a dozen friends who had been seriously seeking jobs last year and this year found them; friends who had their homes for sale for several years had just sold them. I brought to mind how synchronistic that last year I pulled money out of an investment days before the big drop, so I had it when the IRS asked for it all shortly afterward.
I thought how synchronistic that before everyone wanted one, I bought a Toyota Prius. I bought one when everyone in town was saying they couldn’t find a Prius on a car lot and the waiting time for ordering one was a long one. Yet when I went to Greenwise Motors, they had 4 on their lot. The thing is that when I went looking for one, I had not been told they were hard to find, so I didn’t have a hard time finding several in one place to choose from. The Universe was delivering to me even when others felt they were being withheld from. My ignorance of public opinion served me very well then, too.
So in the moments I spent at the Chevron pump filling my tank, I was bringing to mind all sorts of hopeful signs I’d personally seen around me this year as evidence that things were looking up and beginning to come back to balance. I spend those few moments at the pump well, doing a little creative visualization session on behalf of us all, and feeling really good about it all.
As I finished up, my thoughts turned to the economy and how it can come back into balance in a short time if people stop freaking out and being fearful. I knew their experience did not have to be mine. But I also felt compassion and didn’t want it to be their experience either.
My thoughts changed from feeling appreciative for all the good I “luck into” and how well things were going for friends around me, to thoughts of “how can I get everyone to realize their thoughts today really DO create their tomorrow” so they would change them and stop being so unhappy. Aha! That was a crucial pivot point in my thoughts. It took me out of vibrating in a good high, fun, appreciative place, to a place of concern and worry and wanting something I had no control over to be other than it was.
So, riding the vibrational wave of this thought, the pump tells me I must go inside and get my receipt from the clerk. I go inside, get my receipt, and since the price per gallon was so much lower than I remembered, I ask: “Are gas prices changing?” And that’s when she said yes, it had just gone up 14c a gallon and she launched into her long, sad, scary story about how the whole country is going to hell in a handbasket. Yes, she really said that 🙂
But I had attracted that from her. I had allowed my thoughts to pivot back to “Oh, I wish things were different, I wish people weren’t so scared, I wish they knew to choose their thoughts deliberately. I wish I knew how to get that message to everyone. I wish there weren’t so many lies and mis-information out there being fed to an unwitting public, keeping them feeling helpless and so easily coerced.” Since those were my thoughts, is it any wonder I encountered that clerk with that attitude when I went inside for my receipt?
Now I could have stood there and contradicted her and told her my opinion of how she should just fix her thoughts and tell all her friends to do the same, and we could have argued and discussed back and forth for an hour or more. But I immediately recognized what I’d done, and how I’d attracted that. I knew exactly when my thoughts pivoted to that other place, that other point of attraction. It was my choice then to either engage in discussion about it with her and keep myself in that lower, slower vibratory stance, or to move on to happier things and get on with my happy day.
I’ve learned to recognize that having discussions with people about things like that only serve to accelerate my own downward spiral, no matter how good my ego might feel and how well it might be fed by me showing off what I think I know. Nowadays, as soon as I recognize it, I simply extricate myself from the situation as quickly and as kindly as I can. I simply told her I felt hopeful, took my receipt and went on my merry way.
So how DO you tell someone like that how to experience luck and joy when they say the economy is crumbling? Rev. Beth Head at Unity of Melbourne each Sunday always shares several pieces of good news that is going on worldwide. Things you don’t read about in the headlines on the front page. Just think if we kept the front page to all the good news going on worldwide, and had to search inside for short one liners about conflict anywhere. I wonder how much more hopeful we’d be as a nation.
The answer to experiencing luck and joy when anyone says anything otherwise is to simply stay focused on the good news. Stay focused on what is right in front of your face every day that you love and appreciate and are grateful for. Think of everyone you know and bring to mind at least one positive aspect about them. Then simply continue to do this every day.
Do it steadily for a week and you’ll see things begin to change for the better.
Make it a habit and within a month you will be living a different life.
I promise 🙂
RELATED: Abraham-Hicks on Thriving in the New World Economy
Abraham-Hicks on the Economy and the Law of Attraction
