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I’ve noticed an interesting pattern emerge as I write blog posts or articles: What I publish often isn’t what started writing. I say that because if I try to think my way through what I write, I get stuck. However, when I practice “stream of consciousness” writing, the words flow more easily, and I’m happier with the finished product.
I remember reading a long time ago that fiction writers don’t write their stories as much as they rewrite their stories. Having written plenty of fiction in my day, I can say from my own experience that’s true… and the same holds true of blog writing—at least for me. I rewrite my blogs more than I write them. Sometimes my first draft is my final draft, but that’s only when I’ve written from a place of total connectedness.
And that brings up an interesting question I wanted to ask this week:
Have you ever thought about what your life would be like if you could rewrite your own story?
My experience has taught me that you can. Yeah, yeah, I know that sounds cliché, but speaking from experience, I’d say that’s true.
When I first started down my path of personal development and awakening, I heard many times that “every day is a new beginning!” I used to roll my eyes whenever someone said that, but when I started to actually treat every day as an opportunity to start fresh, I discovered that hmm, maybe there’s something to this “new day, new beginning” thing. I admit I used to call it “new day, new age bullshit,” but when I changed my attitude and the way I approached life (because my old patterns certainly weren’t working), I started seeing the value of leaving the past in the past, not worrying about the future, and focusing on the present.
Time is a funny thing. When you get into the realm of quantum mechanics, the idea of past, present, and future existing simultaneously can really twist your brain into knots if you’re not a physicist or mathematician. In overly simplistic terms, the concept of linear time is an illusion.
Albert Einstein outlined this principle with his Special Theory of Relativity. Mathematically, it is possible to move backward and forward through time, even if we haven’t figured out the logistics of how to move physical matter through time. Practically, however, we move through time every day, but we don’t think about it.
Take a conference call, for instance. I used to I participate in a weekly video call where the participants were scattered around the globe. For me, the calls took place late afternoon on Tuesday, but for the folks calling in from Australia, it was early to mid-morning on Wednesday.
In very real terms, I was speaking to people in my future, and those same people are speaking to me in their past, but from the perspective of everyone on the call, we’re speaking to each other NOW. Although we joked about the time zone differences and the future/past thing, we didn’t dwell on the idea too much because our brains would go into meltdown.
Here’s the beauty of how living in the now benefits us: Whatever happened in our childhood, or five years ago, or even five minutes ago doesn’t have to define our lives NOW.
We can choose, in this very instant, to let go of whatever it is that’s bothering us or causing us emotional discomfort and start writing a new story. We can let go of the judgment and self-criticism and start speaking and thinking in new ways that feel better. The story we tell NOW is the only one that matters.
That’s not to say that we’re not going to have times when we revert to old habits or stories. We’ve been telling those stories for years, or in some cases our entire lives. The stories are familiar, they’ve been embellished, and they roll off our tongues with the ease of rain falling from the sky. We need time to bridge the gap between old stories and the new stories we want to tell.
How long that takes depends on the individual, but we can start our transition NOW by telling stories that feel better than our old stories… and we can keep telling those better-feeling stories until we see the evidence of the changes we want to see.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that differentiating between old familiar stories and new, good-feeling stories isn’t always easy. Familiar stories may feel good precisely because they’re familiar. The feeling of familiarity often masks itself as a good feeling, when in fact the opposite is true.
Just because we’ve grown accustomed to feeling sad or unhappy doesn’t mean we’re actually feeling good. When we talk to friends, and all we do is complain, or when we’re tempted to give into feelings of resignation, or when we say things like, “that’s just the way it is,” we’re getting indicators that we’ve settled into patterns of familiarity.
Good-feeling stories, on the other hand, ignite feelings of hope or anticipation. Good feeling stories inspire us to do something different “just because,” or they help us recognize that we can change direction RIGHT NOW.
When we tell those stories, we find ourselves releasing the feelings of guilt or judgment in favor choosing to feel good about new experiences or new things we’ve learned just by being human.
I already said this, but it bears repeating: The only story that matters is the one we tell right now. We can repeat the same old tale that feels familiar but keeps us stuck, or we can tell a new story that makes us nervous but gives us hope. The choice is ours.
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This post was originally published on AppioHunter.com and is republished with the author’s permission.
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