The Joys and Challenges of a Lively Inner World
Attracting the Future Your Heart Desires
Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.” –Albert Einstein
Many of us have heard the expression, “Be careful what you wish for.” And then there’s this slight tweak, “Be intentional what you wish for!” Quite often we’re encouraged to go inside of our rich imaginations, believe, dream, and take actions aligned with these sometimes ridiculous, fanciful, and whimsical ideas that simply make us really giddy with joy.
My latest imagining is seeing myself standing on a stage with hundreds of people belly laughing in the audience as I perform a one-woman show of hilarity about all kinds of life experiences. This could be that side gig to my current work. It seems that heart, genuine connection, and truth can be that edutainment people crave. Plus, I’ve had many people over the course of my life encourage me to “lighten up.”
While I have a great deal of empath in me, I also have continued to cultivate a quirky sense of humor of the self-deprecating type. With regards to the former, I notice the following scenario. When people walk by me unknowingly billowing puffs of heartache and anxiety, I’m often gasping for breath from their secondhand emotional contagion. Days later I wonder why I don’t sleep through the night and feel like layers of wet, dirty rags smother my heart.
Those of us who know we’re highly sensitive people realize that we must tread lightly in crowds of people because we might go home and want to crawl into bed under many covers. On the other hand, we sometimes carry around quite a lot of unresolved emotional debris in our force fields and are not aware how dense it is. It impacts our ability to tap into that lively imagination.
You may be quite busy in your brilliant mind flowing down many tracks of thought, plans, schemes, and internal spreadsheets. You include worse case scenarios in these mental streams as you carefully analyze and critique. “Just think it for awhile and then do it with precision.” is your motto. Occasionally checking in with your emotional or imaginative world may seem like an unnecessary distraction or a reminder why you’re ruminating because you really care.
You may have figured out ways to handle your internal energy field in ways that support your innovative impulses. Some thoughts linked to emotions are simply energy in motion and were designed to pass through like weather patterns. You may not belly laugh at yourself and weep with gratitude like I do, but you’ve figured out how to keep your internal disc drive smooth, clean, and humming along to groovy tunes. This frees up space for colorful insights and bursts of inspiration.
Which leads me to that hilarious part of you and what I observe inside of me. I can laugh at my self, as I seem to generate comical experiences or silly thoughts that I’m naïve enough to actually utter aloud which regularly leads to embarrassment and then much belly laughing. I crack myself up with my ridiculousness. I’ve gotten better at not taking myself so seriously or others or experiences.
There’s great empowerment in reframing challenges into funny stories that make others laugh like the time I fell off a ladder being a badass cleaning the gutters of my house. The force of the ladder coming down broke a metal bench in half. I had not paid attention and placed the ladder on my patio upside down with the grippy feet up in the air. Relieved that I walked away with bruises and some scrapes, I sat my badass down with my dumbass and my wiseass talked to both of them. A beloved friend came to finish that gutter cleaning and hung my ladder up in a way that would require me to get another ladder to get it down. We both laughed a great deal.
I recognize that most of us have much going on in our internal worlds and maybe these secret yearnings that dance and play in our imaginations can become our realities. Yet how many of us put a stake in the ground and say, “I am doing this!! Right now!! I’m going for this latest wild hallucination of hilarity.”
I’ve observed that an optimal way to live life may be to integrate these processes, stretch outside of our “go to” comfort spot, and discern when and where to apply the Just Think It, the Just Process It and the Just Experience it and gain mastery in observing what’s happening in our hearts and imaginations. Finding the ability to weave, flow, and create from a deep well of inspiration and intuition can open doors to an unrecognizable and joyful future reality. The getting there can be wildly liberating.
It takes great courage to be fully yourself, to laugh at yourself, and fall in love with this moment, the journey, and create a life you love living knowing you can expand into new realms of being and express your creative ideas. Maybe you’ll want to join me on the stage and we could do skits, improvisation, and riffs together?
… How many of you have been on-line dating? Well I needed a Sherpa guide because I was like Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, sweet and very naïve. I created my handle WildGeesemo11 because I really thought the dude in Internet land would know the poetry of Mary Oliver (mo) and the poem “Wild Geese.” I did not know about urban dictionary!……
Are your imaginings distractions to towing the line of your current trajectory or invitations to take another path home to deeper joys and delights or something else? What are you creating from the inside to the outside of your life? What are your “coming attractions”?