I read Heart-Broken Open and what amazes me about author Kristine Carlson is her ability to remain with the unknown.  She took time to be with the hearbreak of losing her husband, to live with it as a natural (albeit painful) part of life, to not reject it and eventually and in some way to welcome it. 

And I found that beautiful. After all when the unknown comes knocking it is

Not a comfortable place to make camp.

When life tosses us a curve ball and we wobble a bit,  most often the difficult thing about it is that it feels like we are swinging in the dark.  It is hard when we cannot see the next step. We can't see how it will work out.

We've been dropped into the unknown.

And we want out.  Fast. Of course, that's problematic when we can't get rid of things simply by ignoring or avoiding them. So how do we live with not knowing how it will all turn out and having little power to change things sometimes?

Sometimes we believe we can escape by thinking our way out. We start overthinking. We ruminate. We worry. As if we could apply enough worry to something to solve it!  We try to find peace by over-intellectualizing and we want to leave nothing unknown, no stone unturned, no mystery unexplained. 

Even our 'mystery novels' are tied up neatly in the end, now I think about it...

It is as if we have lost tolerance for mystery. Our scientific-driven world dislikes the unknown and the unknowable in ways that ancient civilizations did not.

How will we discover something new if we can't invite the mystery of life, instead of pushing it away?

When was the last time you answered a question "I don't know"?

Personally I've really suffered from the I should know by now syndrome.

In many cases, if not all, my life would have been better served if I had let go of trying to know and found a way to allow myself to be moved and changed by what was happening. But I wanted out of the hot water as fast as I could.  Maybe its the discomfort. The discomfort with being uncomfortable.

So as I've fought with what life throws me, I look back and notice I've been dragged kicking and screaming to my greatest learning experiences.  All of which, I am now most grateful for. 

My question is, knowing the discomfort, how do you go at life with an open stance and open arms? 

It is not easy. Christine showed me ways I never imagined that you could grow and become more peaceful in yourself by accepting all the feelings that arise and not trying to push them away or rationalize them.

It seems to me that the measure of peace of mind is not so much that we are in some consistent state with no moods, no ups and downs, and no frenzy, but that finding peace is actually about making peace with the fact that we do have moods, we do get upset and we do get a little crazy sometimes.

That's not excuse-making, that's just being bigger than what happens to you.

One of my wonderful teachers in life, Jacob Glass, often talks about how we choose to come at life.  I find his way of approaching life worth trying out. It's called "Lots Can Happen" (read more here).

And if you love living life as an experiment, listen to myself and Jen Louden on Friday, March 11 on the radio show.  She and I talk about how her new SAVOR AND SERVE life experiment begins with not knowing the answer, but looking forward to finding out! 

My Dad told me this story about him when he was a boy. 

He was getting the usual lecture you get as a kid that's meant to keep you from burning yourself on the stove.  You know, the "Don't touch! That's hot" admonition.

So later he was sitting next to fireplace and his mom, my grandmother, (who was a bit fierce I thought) is giving him very serious instructions to NOT go near the fire.  Because, that's hot.

No sooner did she finish her last words, my father stuck his hand right into the flames.

"Why did you do that?" my grandmother asked.

"Because I wanted to see what 'hot' felt like," he said.

We think that the more we understand or know, the easier life will become.  But what we mean by 'easy' is that no more bad stuff will happen.

We soon find that no matter how much you know, how enlightened you are or how spiritual your life, bad shit still happens to you and all around you.

In fact, one of the questions I get most when I'm coaching people is "I know so much, how come this is still happening?"

But the point of living is not to never experience hot. 

In fact, as my Dad said, you really have to have your own experiences of hot, cold and everything in between - because no one, no matter how knowledgeable, can ever give you the experience of your life.

You can only get that by living it.

Here's is my favorite explanation for how this works:

Becoming more balanced and aware does not mean that bad things never happen, it's that when they do, you know you will be OK.

**
If you liked this you might like my other posts on Thinking or Learning

Before I got out of bed this morning I could hear the wind and rain.  As I sat with my tea, with the rain blowing sideways and the sky looking distinctly unfriendly...I realized...

it hadn't occurred to me to be upset.

In that moment I saw that I was perfectly content and I had no concern whatsoever that this storm would 'never finish' or that 'the sun will never come out again'. 

It just didn't cross my mind.  (or if it had, I had dismissed it)

When I talk about the nature of our internal weather, our emotions and our thinking, people often tell me we have habitual thoughts that hold us back and that it's really hard to change.

My answer is, well, the last time you thought about killing someone, did you actually do it? 

The fact is, we think. We are thinking our way through life.   And the fact is we are also ignoring some of our thinking all the time.

We are living in an internal weather system of thought.   

Isn't it interesting that we worry that thought storms will never pass?

One of the things I've learned about myself and also about my business over the years is: "Lots can happen."

Lots can happen. Make that a motto.

I don't have to look far in my life to see the truth in this.

Sometimes things shift in the very moment I'm thinking "this will never happen."
And the only times I've really regretted are the times I wasted worrying something
would never happen that I didn't have control of over anyway.  Then there all the things I missed because I was looking the other way.

what if we...

• Don't assume today is a predictor of anything at all
• Don't assume today's No or today's numbers mean anything about tomorrow
• Assume we don't know
• Assume what we see cannot possibly be ALL there is

In order to live in a world where we don't assume, it doesn't mean
taking in zero information. But it does mean evaluating information
differently.

Like refusing to make everything mean something about me!

I want to strip away all the meaning that we make about how things WILL turn out, all our predictive and unfounded scenarios (all attitudes that shut down our creativity) and focus on what I do not know. 

Out of what I do not know, comes all possibility

Please pull out your project plans now and  look them over and ask yourself: where have I Ieft room for what I do not yet know? 

Where have I shut myself down because I am assuming I know everything and what everything means?

Where have I made mistakes because I am assuming that the limits of my thinking are equal to the limits of the my possibilities?

I have wanted to write a book for a long time.  About 40 years actually.  Now that I'm finally in the process of writing it, I'm fascinated by what has changed in me that flipped my switch from "later" to "right now". 

What happens in any of us that makes the difference between doing something and not doing it?

I'm not talking about getting in the groceries or finally changing the battery in the smoke alarm, I am talking about why we procrastinate on anything that is really important to the heart and soul.

After all, that's what we save our best procrastination for, Right?  For me, that was writing a book. 

What flipped my switch from 'talker' to 'doer'?

• Why is it that now I have a accountability group? 
• Why is it that now I have goals I'm setting and exceeding?
  
• Why is it that I'm not struggling to keep promises?
  

Here is what I notice that is different.

One, I really do like (enjoy, want, genuinely desire) both the end product the process of doing it.  Just because I do.

Two, I enjoy being engaged in something in my life that is meaningful to me.  I've worked out that the other way is not all that great.

Three, I know that I am able to feel good whether or not I ever write the book.  No matter what.

Of all these things, here is what I notice. One and Two are not new. Number 3 is.

I never knew how to feel good about my life without a condition of some sort. I'd agreed with myself I'd feel good when I was successful. I'd feel good if in a great relationship... etc. As for writing,  I spent years making myself unhappy because I wasn't doing it.  I thought I'd be happy when I did.

I can't pinpoint the day or hour of the flip, but in the last few years I've learned that my own wellbeing isn't dependent on some thing happening (or not happening). I've learned how to stop measuring my inner state of being by the things or people outside of me. I know, how self-evident is that!  

So if you have ever said to yourself or someone else "well, you can't buy happiness" or "happiness isn't 'out there'" - let's get wise to ourselves. We said the words without ever having had the experience. Period.

That experience is new, it's totally unfamiliar, and life changes almost immediately when you feel it because it is a living force. That force says to me "So, Elese, we're cool, what would we like to do next?" 

It's as if I unhitched the old 'happiness-when trailer' that was towing  all my self-love and self-approval and success strategies and just left it on the side of the road. 

There is no 'happiness when'  attached to my writing anymore. There is just writing.

Don't let anyone tell you that when you start feeling good inside you will just want to sit around in some meditative state chanting till you die. Don't let them tell you that if you can't feel the stress, you won't find the motivation. Don't let them tell you you'll just feel happy and then life will somehow get boring because you feel so good.  It doesn't work like that.

What really happens is without all the noise about what you need to do to be happy, you actually begin to feel good a lot of the time and from there you see for the first time what's really important to you. Up until then, it's just guessing, hoping and stabbing in the dark.

Learning to feel good for no apparent reason is essentially the best thing you can do for yourself.  For me it meant finally getting off my duff, and writing without caring how it turns out. 

And if I hadn't decided to write, I guess the downside is I'd simply feel good regardless.

Radio show with Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, on the psychology of creation and Overcoming Blocks January 28 

(free workshops in January if you are interested in what I learned and how to do it yourself
or
enroll in my program Foundations of Wellbeing

People tell me the hard part about goals is not setting them, but the pain of not getting them.   I think the really hard part is not confusing the goal with our happiness. 

Most of us define a goal as something we will get or become.

But why decide you want something you don't have and then pin your happiness on getting it?   It's like deciding you want ice cream and forcing yourself to be miserable while you drive to the store to get it.One of the worst things we can do is decide that getting a goal will mean finally being happy, successful or worthy.  It doesn't.  You are already worthy, no matter what you do and whether or not you ever get your goals.

A goal is just a clear picture of what 'there' looks like. It's neutral. Personally, I like goals because I like to see and envision where I'm headed.  For me right now, that looks like a book rather than a tub of Ben and Jerrys.

I know that I will be able to recognize 'there' because I'll have a book in my hand.

Putting together a book (as in pursuing any goal) is a bit like  a very large puzzle - the stepping-stone goals are like the pieces of the puzzle - the more of them click into place, the more I can see what the final puzzle looks like. In fact the more pieces I click into place, the more the final puzzle solution (the book) become inevitable.  A no-brainer.

At no point do I want to get frustrated that my puzzle isn't finished yet and toss over the table. I want to enjoy the process of putting together my puzzle. Piece by lovely piece, I want to relish seeing the images and forms come together, as if by magic, out of a pile of mess.

I want to be happy doing my puzzle and happy not doing it.

Because I don't ever want to confuse puzzles (or ice cream) with who I am.