Being Flexible with the Universe

As I've written in this blog a number of times before, I love to take a few days at the Jewish New Year to reflect on the past year and to imagine the path before me in the next year. I choose to use this time to set my intentions for the year ahead. The date of the holiday fluctuates, but it is generally between mid-September and early-October.  This year it began at sundown on September 13.

I am not Jewish, but coinciding the timing for such reflection with the holiday makes sense to me, perhaps because I spent so many years, either as a teacher or student, starting a school year in the fall. I love to learn, and the anticipation on new lessons always excited me. Similarly, my reflections inevitably reveal lessons from the year past and point to potential learning in the year ahead.

Or maybe the timing makes sense to me because I am a gardener, and fall marks the conclusion of the harvest and the dropping of seeds into the ground to sprout the following spring. It is always rewarding to consider what I've grown in the past year and to wonder what I will seed in the year ahead.

For whatever reason, taking a few days of silence at this time of year has become essential to my spiritual growth and development for the last 20 years.  You can understand my consternation, then, when I discovered that this year's somewhat early holiday was going to occur during a short trip to Spain that I'd booked some time ago. I was book-ended on the trip with work commitments and a training session, making it difficult to extend my vacation in either direction. What would I do?  Fortunately or otherwise, the pace of activity leading to the trip overcame thoughts of figuring out what I would do.

As it worked out, I was in Barcelona on the 13th.  I love architecture, and there is nowhere that I've been which is more richly endowed with extraordinary edifices as those seeded by Antoni Gaudi about Barcelona.  At about noon on the 13th, as I sat soaking in the light and color, awestruck again as I'd been during an earlier visit in 2012, the date occurred to me.  For someone who loves architecture, there could not have been a more spiritual setting for reflection.  So I sat and reflected.

(For  more images, see: https://www.google.com/search?q=pictures+of+la+sagrada+familia+barcelona&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDgQ7AlqFQoTCMz83Lif_scCFYVWPgodmpQFtA&biw=864&bih=494#imgrc=5xYv7yXQlAZ4LM%3A)

The funny thing is that when I'd shared my dilemma about not having my meditation retreat with my friend Amy a few weeks earlier, she'd suggested that I find a church wherever I was and meditate. Without conscious intention, that is exactly what had occurred. Over the next 24 hours, I kept bumping into experiences that stimulated reflection, and the day ended with me sitting and reflecting in the Cathedral of Barcelona, the only Gothic cathedral in the city.

Furthermore, during the week I was in Spain, I ran into one situation after another that encouraged me to look inward. (More on some of those in the next few days.) So, my time of reflection was quite different than had been my norm, but by being flexible with the Universe and letting it leading me where I needed to be, I accomplished the intention of my annual retreat in a very different way. (And for my listening and flexibility, the Universe threw in some very good Spanish food and wine as a bonus--have to say that really beat my usual fasting regime.)

Let Go of Your Plan....

Much of my life has been magical.  One door closed, another opened.  One relationship ended, the next week another began.  Whenever I needed resources, suddenly they appeared.  Tired of one job, as soon as I'd say it was time for something else, another was there.  Once I was chastised by an executive in the community for not letting him know I was looking because he would have liked to hire me: alas, I told him, I wasn't really looking.

Then somewhere along the line, something shifted.  I cannot pinpoint when the change occurred, but I do know it was somewhere around the time that the world got much more focused on goals, metrics, master minding, and being able to demonstrate a plan and progress toward execution.  I know it happened for me; I think it happened for a number of my clients.  What happened?

I watched a movie over the weekend in which there was a line, "Let go of your plan and let Fate carry you."  In that moment, a thought crystallized that I haven't considered for a long time.  It has to do with letting God be God.  In the old days when a relationship or job began to feel stale, I'd let God know it was time for something new.  (My intention)  But, I didn't try to figure out next steps or what I wanted.  I just let God send me something better, and inevitably, it was. 

I've been wanting a relationship for years.  I've put together the collages that the proponents on Oprah have espoused, and I've put them under my mattress so that I could send the Universe my message as I slept.  I've occasionally perused internet dating sites with unsatisfying results.  I've even attended events that I thought would attract my kind of guy.  Needless to say, I've been available at dances.

A more satisfying job has been on my wish list, too.  I've applied for a bunch for which I was well qualified without any response. I did that again this afternoon, spending several hours modifying my resume for the keywords in the posting so that the technology could find me. 

When I heard that line last night, "Let go of your plan and let Fate carry you," I knew it was time to let God be God again.  Let be whatever will be to my higher good and that of the Universe.  Wow!  I can exhale because I can let go of attempting a job for which I will never qualify: the job of being God.  I do believe what the actor in the movie implied by "...let Fate carry you," is to allow myself to flow with what God wants to happen. Allow miracles to happen.  So, I will...let go of my plan and let Fate carry me.

What To Do With An Extra Hour

Yesterday I heard a commentator pondering what to do with an extra hour this weekend.  He suggested a number of options from reading one of several books that he had purchased but never had time to read to starting or completing a number of projects around the house.  I used my extra hour this weekend to attend a fascinating lecture.  It felt like a guilty pleasure, and because I had an extra hour, it was mine to indulge.

The commentary got me started thinking, not only about what to do with the extra hour this weekend, but also about settling into a normal work schedule.  After a year of 11- and 12-hour days, would I know how to use two extra hours each day?  Last week I worked in a different organization and I was able to leave almost-on-time two days.

I found myself at loose ends when I got home at 6.  I did a number of little projects, including making phone calls to businesses that are usually closed by the time I got home.  But, mostly I frittered the time away without focus.  I couldn't remember when I hadn't felt like I was on a dead-run from project to project without time to breathe.  Suddenly, I had time to exhale, and I'd forgotten how.

The commentary yesterday reminded me that I didn't have an extra hour in a weekend, but would soon have an extra two hours a day.  I want to be intentional about what I do with the gift of an extra day each week.  I am not sure that I've ever really appreciated what a gift time is, and there are things I really want to make sure that I accomplish.  What would take me where I wanted to go?   I had some ideas.

Yesterday I entertained some special women friends for a lazy, lingering brunch.  After they were gone, and I'd cleaned up my kitchen, I decided that Job One was cleaning off my desk.  Actually, that isn't quite right.  My desk was clean, but only because I'd gathered up the mess before my guests arrived and shoved it into a closet.  Intuitively, I knew that I couldn't be intentional about dispensing with my extra hours if I didn't know what was in my stack.

I reduced the stack by half and then started a list.  Writing is on the top of it.  I hope that you will soon be seeing more regular posts to this blog because I have a full page of notes about posts to write.  My head was literally spinning with all the ideas.  More came this morning in church.  Others have popped in this afternoon.  I felt like cleaning the desk had cleared out thinking room in my brain. 

Getting back in shape is right up there too.  Exercising isn't really competing for writing with Number One.  Exercising is how I used to clear the cobwebs of the day's activities from my brain so that I could listen.  Exercising feels more to me like how I facilitate writing than competition with writing for time.

On the desk, I also found my list of last-day items that I'd created after a blog post last winter about living each day as if it is your last.  Since it got buried in the stack, nothing more had been accomplished.  The list has worked its way to the top of my stack.

Amazingly for me, that is where I stopped, and that's a good thing.  I tend to be someone who makes big lists and then accomplishes just a few items before either becoming overwhelmed or getting distracted.  I think it is good that I am being very intentional about how I will use my extra day each week. 

I also think it is good that I don't fill every moment with replacement activities.  I want to have time to exhale; that is something I don't want to forget.  Who knows? When I exhale, I might just make space to breathe in new and wonderful miracles that I can't anticipate.  That is where I allow God to be God.