My challenge to you: Use your imagination as a tool to invent where you want to be and reinvent where you have been … it just may be WHY you’ve been given an imagination to begin with.
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When we look forward to what may happen in our life, whether a promise of something amazing to come or the anxiety of confrontation, we are using both our personal programming and our imagination to create then construct a future scenario to live within.
When we look backward and pine for past moments and relations or cringe from past horrors, we are using our personal programming and our imagination to reconstruct what actually happened.
In both cases, future and past, reality only exists as our own invention. Both positive and negative. The extreme joy, the horrendous trauma and the mundane everyday interactions. It is all a personal reality that we have personally created.
There is a concept known as the “butterfly effect”… which in my mind is relevant to both past and future healing work. The “butterfly effect” refers to the theory that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly several weeks before would influence the strength and trajectory of a tornado today. It means that if you could change even the smallest thing in the past … then the the present would be altered.
The idea of changing history just by imagining something different may seem overreaching, even silly. But if one thinks about it, we change what we remember and we rewrite our history all the time. We will even find and invent clues to support these new histories .. .then call them reality. A contemporary example is within conspiracy theory and even politics. If a story is told enough times, then it eventually becomes truth … to that community or individual, anyway. So it begs the question, who is right? Who is wrong? This is where our old friend “Mr. Judgment” comes and makes one “truth” face off against another “truth”.
The “butterfly effect” as it relates to the future is relevant, as well. It can be incredibly powerful to place ourselves in a position to imagine that what we do (maybe even everything we do) is a “seed” that creates and brings to life something grand. To treat each moment as a “Legacy moment” can make us live our present life in a very sacred way. Of course on a more undesirable note, we can also see that our bad decisions may cause a ripple of bad things to happen out into the future… even generational.
I now will move on to then next flower…. Butterfly has spoken.
This is my journey.
— Nate Long “Owl”
Photograph