What Do You Believe?

Belief creates the actual fact. – William James

What you believe you create.

How?

Simple.

You act in accordance with your beliefs.

Your beliefs are the thoughts you no longer question. They are unlike the myriad thoughts you have forgotten or dismissed.

Your beliefs are the thoughts that have hooked your attention, are sufficiently congenial with your values and – somehow, someway – serve your goals.

Unfortunately, all that most people are able to let themselves want is to be safe and secure. To be “happy.*”

This “happiness” is really just a not-quite-miserable; a sort of neither well or sick. A way of existing that keeps you small, and, I suppose, safe.**

So many people mistake quiet and calm for happiness.

Sometimes though, it’s when nothing seems to be happening that we need to pay the most attention.

It is then that we need to pay attention to what we believe: is what we believe in harmony with the dynamic, sometimes challenging, nature-of-things, or are we merely clinging to what was, wishing we can make it stay that way forever?

***

* Most people, in reality, consider “being happy” merely the absence of acute pain or suffering… there’s so much more to happiness though.

** Not really safe though, because life, and change, continues (always and forever). Eventually disruption happens – disruption is just large-scale change that happens quickly and, often, painfully. Another way to think about it is: you can either wade through a swift moving stream, about up to your knees, making progress in small steady increments, or you can walk up a dry river bed, only to face a wall of water when the water behind a dam is released.