It has been said that the things you fear the most will show up in your life, or more famously stated, “that which you resist persists.”
I’ve often wondered why this was so, as I dealt with a multitude of situations which reflected the authenticity of this statement, ad nauseam. In a bizarre twist of reverse psychology, I’ve even toyed with convincing myself that I’m afraid of achieving my goals. What would that even look like? Allow me to explain, “Oh my god! What would I do if I were wildly successful at life?? What would that be like? I’d have time and leisure. Oh no!” That’s about as odd as a football bat, but that’s exactly what so many of us do…only replace “were” with “were not” and “I would” with “I don’t,” and you’ve got pretty much every average person getting exactly what they think about through constant repetition. (I’m not even sure that this makes sense, but now that I think about it, maybe I will try this.)
Truthfully, who in their right mind would do things which repel their wishes and dreams? What I found is that we do so inadvertently. We are wrapped up in the familiar and have no real idea what the feeling of fulfilling our dreams would provide. So many of us think it will feel great to achieve our goals, but all too often the fear of not reaching our goals is a much more familiar emotion to access, and that’s what we repeat. While most of us fret over trying to control for perilous variables, we are distracted and fail to realize that such repetition is placing our focus on mitigating the wrong feeling…when we should be focused on cultivating the feeling we desire, and forgetting everything else.
So what does any of this have to do with the title of this post? Well, the title was more of an announcement from me to you. However you’ve come to this page, whether by WordPress or that you’ve actually read one of my short stories, I just want you to know that you are witnessing the infancy of me embracing the unfamiliar. The embrace of what I truly want to do, and for the record, I truly want to challenge myself to get better and better at conveying a scene, with the hope that one day I’ll be able to combine many scenes into something worth reading.
I have already begun to see myself evolve in this process – “Barren Eden” proved infinitely more refined than its predecessors, and I hope you can see that, too. Life is an evolutionary process of practice, one I intend to fully embrace by shedding the implication of not achieving my goals, and putting to rest the cycles which no longer serve me.
Truly, thank you all for taking this journey with me.
