This wealth drop comes as a result of a very interesting interaction with Naman, one of our readers from India, as we explore how to manage ups and downs.
Around when I turned 40, I had enough evidence that life was not a straight line going up, but a series of ups and downs. When we are up, we feel we have accomplished something, get a better view, and enjoy our contentment. Ahhh it is all about how “we made it”. When we are down, we feel incomplete, have lost our vision, and can’t understand why we are there. Ahhh it is all about “life is hard”. Looking at life as a series of dots of “ups” did not do it for me. I found that connecting the dots was a much better way of living my life. Staying up on the top is only good for a short period of time, otherwise we become arrogant and stop growing. Somehow we get the urge to explore other areas, even if it means coming down. Like the chaos theory that claims that the world evolves towards order until it can’t stand it anymore and explodes.
The problem when thinking in ups and downs, is that we miss the complexity of going sideways. So I was looking for another analogy and found out multidimensional puzzles? Have you ever worked on a puzzle? What is more enjoyable? The ‘moment’ when you are done or the “period’ where you are testing this or that, trying to find the best possible piece and realizing it has a perfect fit to then go to the next empty hole? Well, that is exactly what happens in life. You get the pieces all rumbled and scattered and life is but a journey to find the pieces and put them in the perfect fit spots… some pieces are there for no reason, simply because we can’t connect them.
Some people have a vision of their puzzle, and they move quite fast… until the chaos theory kicks in and mmmm we want to explore without a vision. Others go around and as they find a piece they put it somewhere, they are less efficient but they also reach a point where the chaos theory kicks in and voila, time to get a vision and move faster. Sometimes we throw away pieces, sometimes we even have to create them. (been there, done that)
Regardless of how we put the pieces in our puzzle one thing is sure: There is no use in trying thousands of times to put a piece where it does not belong!!! If the panorama changed, you are in a different part of the puzzle, perhaps the one you don’t know, perhaps the one you are comfortable with.
Your experiences and knowledge are the pieces already in your puzzle. Would you take them out? No way. What is new? What needs to be added? What direction do you want to take?
At the end, the fun part is creating the puzzle, not finishing it.
Here is to your game!
Alicia
PS: I’ll be going on a world tour in April and May, to Jeddah and Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Houston, Guatemala, Caracas, Maracay, Santiago de Chile, Montevideo and Buenos Aires. If you are in any of these places, drop me a line and I’ll try to meet with you or to get you a discount ticket to the open events or an invitation to the private ones. More to come as I go along.
PS2: tomorrow is my birthday, couldn't find a better way to celebrate than having my dream of a world tour done! that piece was a hard one!
Showing posts with label connecting the dots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label connecting the dots. Show all posts
Friday, March 27, 2009
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
We are the miracles
It all started to make sense when I was reorganizing our bookshelves, and a book fell in my hands. I took a glimpse at the first page, where the author claims that nothing happens by coincidence.
So it all started to click … the falling star in the Kimberly, where there was absolutely no lights as we were driving late at night through the empty roads because of a late plane… my thoughts on the financial crisis, whilst I was editing once more a chapter on the power of groups which I had renamed earlier the cycle of order and chaos… a friend in Bali and the anniversary of the Bali bombings… the social entrepreneurship business plan competition… my friend’s Maureen who is a walking miracle… and the launch of my book: falling in love with your life.
I had forgotten about the falling star… as I forget about so many things, living under the influence of information overload. Then Chopra brought it back with a simple sentence about miracles and falling starts. Each night, many stars fall, but we are not looking at them. It is as if they require an spectator to come to existence. Same happens with miracles. They happen all the time, yet we are not aware of them.
And I started connecting other dots, based on conversations and reflections lost in the back of my memories, and so diverse: About language onthology in a café in Chile, problem solving in Houston, mind mapping on a flight over the Pacific, cultural differences in Venezuela and making a difference with Ashoka. I also remembered an interview to Tony Melendez, a singer-writer without arms. When he was asked if he believed in miracles, he responded: You see those hands people raise? I see a hand, and I see a miracle.
You see… writing about what it takes to fall in love with our lives has made me a better person. It was written as a way to help my kids go through hard times, specially moving so often being teenagers, then it went to a friend, then another, then my relatives, then some customers until there was a woman in Iran, who manages a girls’s school and asked: why don’t you write a book about it? It seems that yes, we can all connect the dots that brought us here. We take the dots and make the roads… and we do it together. Considering all that others have created and shared with us so we can connect, I can’t but see it as a miracle.
I am constantly pushing people’s envelops: Be the reality you want, be the driving force, stand out of the crowd, be ready to be discovered and enjoy your contribution, be the learning, the world needs you, and needs you to be your best. We all need more prosperity, new ideas, new wealth, and passion. This thing about the financial crisis? Yes I’ve lost a lot who hasn’t? but as far as I am concern we didn’t have them to begin with. We all created them… Let’s be part of the solution, not the problem.
We need more people to believe in the role they play. I am not my funds, my family, my profession, I am the feelings I enact in others. We both need each other to exist. Like the falling stars. We can chose to be part of the crisis, to send panicking information, to be the disaster… yet, we can be the solution, the determination and the resurrection (ok, help me here ‘cause I can’t find another more ‘culturally’ appropriate word, you get the idea).
My great breakthrough with the book, however, was not that miracles need us to exist, but the realization that they need us to create them… Thanks Mauren, for making me realize that.
We are the miracles…
we are…
Alicia
the book? www.fallinginlovewithyourlife.com
So it all started to click … the falling star in the Kimberly, where there was absolutely no lights as we were driving late at night through the empty roads because of a late plane… my thoughts on the financial crisis, whilst I was editing once more a chapter on the power of groups which I had renamed earlier the cycle of order and chaos… a friend in Bali and the anniversary of the Bali bombings… the social entrepreneurship business plan competition… my friend’s Maureen who is a walking miracle… and the launch of my book: falling in love with your life.
I had forgotten about the falling star… as I forget about so many things, living under the influence of information overload. Then Chopra brought it back with a simple sentence about miracles and falling starts. Each night, many stars fall, but we are not looking at them. It is as if they require an spectator to come to existence. Same happens with miracles. They happen all the time, yet we are not aware of them.
And I started connecting other dots, based on conversations and reflections lost in the back of my memories, and so diverse: About language onthology in a café in Chile, problem solving in Houston, mind mapping on a flight over the Pacific, cultural differences in Venezuela and making a difference with Ashoka. I also remembered an interview to Tony Melendez, a singer-writer without arms. When he was asked if he believed in miracles, he responded: You see those hands people raise? I see a hand, and I see a miracle.
You see… writing about what it takes to fall in love with our lives has made me a better person. It was written as a way to help my kids go through hard times, specially moving so often being teenagers, then it went to a friend, then another, then my relatives, then some customers until there was a woman in Iran, who manages a girls’s school and asked: why don’t you write a book about it? It seems that yes, we can all connect the dots that brought us here. We take the dots and make the roads… and we do it together. Considering all that others have created and shared with us so we can connect, I can’t but see it as a miracle.
I am constantly pushing people’s envelops: Be the reality you want, be the driving force, stand out of the crowd, be ready to be discovered and enjoy your contribution, be the learning, the world needs you, and needs you to be your best. We all need more prosperity, new ideas, new wealth, and passion. This thing about the financial crisis? Yes I’ve lost a lot who hasn’t? but as far as I am concern we didn’t have them to begin with. We all created them… Let’s be part of the solution, not the problem.
We need more people to believe in the role they play. I am not my funds, my family, my profession, I am the feelings I enact in others. We both need each other to exist. Like the falling stars. We can chose to be part of the crisis, to send panicking information, to be the disaster… yet, we can be the solution, the determination and the resurrection (ok, help me here ‘cause I can’t find another more ‘culturally’ appropriate word, you get the idea).
My great breakthrough with the book, however, was not that miracles need us to exist, but the realization that they need us to create them… Thanks Mauren, for making me realize that.
We are the miracles…
we are…
Alicia
the book? www.fallinginlovewithyourlife.com
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