It’s been a fun and productive week. I’ve gone to the gym every day, as well as working out at home. I began clearing the underbrush of my woods, a major raking job. My arms and shoulders are getting strong! I’m ready for change, which is one reason I cut a new trail each season. I mused that clearing a path is like clearing any path in life: you get a glimpse down a different road and want to explore it a little. On your way to do that, you have to brush your way past old, dried debris. I find whenever I clear out a new space, new things start happening. I feel freer, more expansive and capable of more. And the more I cleared, the more everything in other parts of my life seemed to fall into place as well. This morning I lucked into two friends with a chainsaw and they cut and stacked two dozen bamboo for me. I seem to “luck into” a lot of good situations, a friend remarked the other day. But it’s not luck at all. It’s that I have an optimistic and hopeful attitude and believe it’s possible for the best to happen to me. She’s “more practical,” she says, and is always on the look out for what to avoid. She anticipates getting a cold each season and she gets one. She anticipates the driver cutting her off, and the drive-thru getting her order wrong. We spent a few hours recently side by side at the same event and had two completely different experiences. It all boils down to what we expect from life and what we believe is possible for us. 

Did you ever wonder why two people sitting side by side doing the same thing can have such different experiences?  A couple of years ago, a friend and I were sitting in a sunny clearing in my woods eating clementine oranges.  We had a little basket of them between us.   Tony can be a real pouty puss sometimes, although he’s a really cool guy.  But he does seem to focus on things around him that are not going well.  So we’re sitting and eating the clementines, which I’d been buying all month.  He  complained that “they were good but they had so many seeds.”  Yet I’d eaten two dozen of them in a two week period with nary a seed.  He was getting seeds and I was not.  He was not fibbing; I saw him spitting out seeds.  So I hand him my clementine and take his.  He bites into mine and finds a seed.  I eat the rest of his with no seeds. We did the same with two more clementines.

The lesson seems to be that being a pouty puss pretty much guarantees you’ll come across seeds, even in seedless fruits. I have so learned that it’s all about vibrational matching.  Yes, even when I am the one getting the seeds.  Especially then.

So why do some attract kindness and generosity and others attract aggravation? It all boils down to what we expect from life and what we believe is possible for us.

“Sure you say that,” she said, “everything goes right for you.” Is it luck or is it that I expect and believe life will support me? Is it that I strive to make the best of trying situations and, knowing it’s all related, I engage only in activities that I don’t mind coming back to me on a karmic wheel of return?

At this point, I live my life in such a way that there’s not too much left in motion to come back and smack me with. I learned that if I left something unresolved, I’d get that lesson over and over in the form of new people and situations with the same core lesson. When I figured out how that worked, I cleaned up my act.

So now, when I feel change is about to happen, I don’t fear it, I’m not worried about what is going to come back to haunt me. I’m not afraid to initiate change by clearing my garden of tangled undergrowth because I know it means I’ll have less to trip myself up on.