ARE YOU A SURVIVOR?
Financial advisors can help you with your money problems. Consignment stores can supply good, used clothing, shoes, and other useful items. You may be able to find a roofer who will set up a payment schedule for the repair work. This will help you to survive materially. But have you noticed your hopes and positive attitude crashing with the stock market?
We’ve all gone a little too far thinking that running fast and acting fast will help us become more creditworthy. Maybe that really happens in the movies. In this down economy, we’re running for cover: back to our front porches, back to late-night dinners around the dining room table, back to driving short distances, buying cheaper produce, and hunting for bargains and low-priced items. at the grocery store.
TODAY’S CHALLENGES
What if you could change your life for the better, not just by finding the right roofer, budgeting for, or ditching the restaurant, vacation, and recreational activities you once enjoyed but now can’t afford? If you can start to “see” your life differently, it will improve your life. That means changing your definitions of things and expanding your vision. That means moving into unfamiliar and possibly uncomfortable areas. But, these changes can improve your outlook. They can enrich your daily pattern of life and erase the darkness and anxiety that come with the challenges many face today due to foreclosures, layoffs, inability to pay the bills, rethinking educational options for their children, and seeing their family and relationships degrade due to those challenges from friends.
CHANGE OF DEFINITIONS
There is another way to create wealth, not financial but starting with your mind. It’s creative stimulation that travels to your productive self and activates your entire brain so that you ultimately have all your resources to achieve the best life possible. If you base your daily decisions and reactions on generic definitions and meanings you’ve had for years, it’s like moving a body of water forward by slowly moving from one small stone to another. It will take you a long time to cross that water. But if you can challenge those definitions you’ve held for so long and start to change them, it will ultimately be like jumping off the dock and swimming across the lake.
CHOOSE HOW YOU SEE
An artist trying to represent a theme is faced with the responsibility of interpreting that theme. Let’s say the artist is painting a still life: three oranges, a porcelain jug on a linen tablecloth. How will the artist paint them? What colors of oil will be chosen? Will you pay close attention to detail or will you abstract away objects in some way to change them? The artist is entirely free to use a personal perspective and to render that perspective accurately and convincingly on canvas. Each brushstroke works toward that goal. A successful painting will represent the subject as the artist intended it to be and this work will enlighten the viewer on the artist’s perspective and the interpretation of that perspective.
So what does this have to do with a non-artist and how would this method be valuable to them? Using a creative approach, just like an artist paints, will help anyone redefine what is important to survive. That is how. A lot of times, especially as we get older, we define things a certain way and we get pretty attached to that definition because it seems like that’s what makes our world solid. We have, in other words, a lot of things in our lives “figured out.”
CUP HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY?
For example, you may always want a beautiful lawn because your father maintained a beautiful lawn and that became a fixed standard for you. Your bank balance may tell you that the landscaping company that has kept your lawn beautiful for the past five years is no longer possible. So you call them and discontinue their service. You are sad because you think you are becoming poor, now that you have been laid off and the gardening service will be just one of the many services and situations that you will have to cancel from your life. You may become depressed by this prospect, or you may view the “theme” of your front lawn in a different way. It is up to you to interpret the things that happen in your life. If you view the cancellation of your lawn service as another sad journey into bankruptcy and ruin, then it will undoubtedly become the scenario that tells your life to proceed that way.
What if you decide that even though you can’t have your lawn the way you’ve always wanted it, you have other options? You can, for example, eliminate it by putting in shrubs and mulching and reducing the high maintenance factor of the lawn. . You can make the decision to live with the grass as is and not worry about it. You may decide to do the landscape work yourself. It would be a good exercise and now that you have time…
Whatever your decision, you’ve migrated from an established definition of “must have a beautiful lawn” to “zeroscape” or whatever option you’ve chosen. You are in control, you are fully responsible for your decision, you won’t get depressed because you can’t have something, but work to fill that void with something else. Your proactive decision is a brushstroke that is working towards a wonderful creative work.
REALITY-IS LIFE A PAINTING?
Yes. Life is like a painting. Let’s go back to the grass scenario. You have stopped the services of the landscaping company and have chosen zeroscape. You study on the internet zeroscaping and start to change your front yard. In three months he has completed the project and is very happy with the results, especially when summer brings hot, dry weather, your neighbors’ sprinklers are running overtime, and you are sitting on your porch overlooking shimmering green bushes, Drought-resistant flowers well mulched and Small patches of very green grass with drip irrigation. The landscape you’ve created only happened because you didn’t give in to your old ideas, that is, “if I can’t have a big green lawn like everyone else, I’m broke. I’m lazy, I’m a misfit, I’m broke.”
Is this very different from an artist who goes out into the woods, sets up the easel, and puts what’s in front of him on canvas? Each brushstroke is a decision to change what we call “reality” into a “reality” on the canvas. If the artist is successful in achieving the desired results, then the painting is good because it does what the artists wanted to do.
Go back to your front yard. When you chose to change it according to what you wanted, each effort worked toward that goal and you created the “reality” you wanted. And you were also successful. You achieved, with your effort, what the artist did with brushstrokes on a canvas. Perhaps you will say that the front yard is more real than the painting. Consider the power of the mind as a reality. In each case, something changed because of a decision, and in that sense, the reality of the painting and the reality of the front yard are the same. Both were traded, one for his zeroscaping works and one for the artist’s brushstrokes.
SO PAINT YOUR LIFE!
If you can see the relationship these two actions have, you can see that you have the power to challenge every definition you have. True power lies in changing those definitions that seem to be destroying your world or negatively affecting it. You must ask yourself, at that moment, how can you change it, how can you change the negative for the positive. True, this is not a new self-help philosophy, however, relating it to creative experience is a different angle. Different because creative thinking is positive thinking in the sense that it has the power to change the definitions that affect our lives for the better. So paint your life! Paint over what you don’t want by changing your definitions and paint over what you do want by applying physical and mental action. Let the challenges of these times be a canvas for the masterpiece of your life!