Redecorating
The blank page is an invitation. “Welcome to my new home” it seems to say. And then it adds, “Please furnish and decorate me.”
We were all a proverbial blank page at one time and then we got decorated.
As the years pass, styles may change but we continue to display what was in vogue then. The only way we get into Architectural Digest
is to let them display our “after” as their “before.”
It’s hard for our intellect to comprehend that we are mentally the same age as the day a specific pattern formed. We recognize that we have physically aged, so that proves we’re no longer who we were then, except for the fact that a pattern gets locked in time.
Some call that immaturity; I view it as reality.
When you continually have the same response to the same stimulus, that should be your first indicator that the cycle had to begin somewhere. You weren’t born with it.
It had a beginning and that beginning, for the most part, doesn’t evolve. It’s like the insurance maxim my brother-in-law shared with me many years ago: “Some people in the insurance business have 25 years of experience repeating their first year over and over again.” The phenomenon is not isolated to insurance.
The hurts we’ve endured early in life often don’t evolve because we still experience them as we did at that age, and we respond just like we did then. That’s childishness and reality wrapped up together in an unevolved pattern.
The reason we act like children sometimes is because our pattern of behavior is that age.
Outgrowing or updating a pattern first and foremost needs the light of day known as recognition. We have to recognize that we are responding now as though we were back then. With that recognition in hand, we have an opportunity to evolve.
A powerful recognition question to ask is “Who’s responding, me or my history?”
Your history is a very powerful pattern that can keep you trapped in the past.
The old saying is profound: “If you don’t pay attention to history, it will repeat itself.”
Begin to recognize who is responding and you’ll have a much better chance of redecorating yourself to fit in with who you are today.
All the best,
John
http://cdbaby.com/cd/johnmorgan
http://www.cafepress.com/grasshoppernote/3580301
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