Becoming a Miracle Maker

Yesterday I wrote about time travel, and one of the challenges of traveling backward in time is that we can't change history.  While time travel forward does carry some challenges--we don't know what will be possible in the future, by that very "limitation," we are freed to create a world where all things are possible.

Forward time travel is actually something that we do frequently in coaching.  Using the vehicle of visualization, we lead our clients to imagine their heart's desire. The imaginings are true in future time.  By being able to strip our world of constraints, the intention is set for the future.  Nothing is impossible. Marching back to the present--its own version of time travel as we "go back" from future time to today--we can map steps to our intended future. 

Just think: all thing are possible.  With passenger planes full of AIDS researchers being shot down by guerillas, and yet one more war starting in the Middle East, the weekend that has just passed felt to me like the world was unwinding at its seams.  But that is now.  I can imagine a world at peace five or ten years from now, and it is so.  "All I need to do" is to time travel back to today and do what I must do to set the wheels in place to enable world peace.  Nothing is impossible.

When I used to do professional speaking, I would ask my audiences to think deeply about the single most important thing that each of them would have to do to create the world of their desired future.  Then I would challenge them to do it...consciously and consistently...until they had changed the world. 

The whole world doesn't need to change, I would say to them, just a critical mass to pull the rest of the world with it.  Some believe that critical mass may be as small as one percent of the world's population.  None of us is superfluous.  What we choose to do, or not do, can literally change the world.

I've just finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster's delightful children's book, which I truly believe cannot be at all appreciated until adulthood, maybe even years into adulthood.  In the book the protagonist is Milo, a boy who is sent off on a great quest by King Azaz, who says that there is one thing that he cannot tell the lad until he returns.  The secret is that everyone "knows" the quest is impossible, but they don't want him to know until he tries it.  Of course, the predictable occurs: Milo accomplishes the challenge through a serious of harrowing encounters with demons.  It is only when he returns that Azaz tells him that the quest was an impossible one.
 
If each of us traveled forward in time and created a world that we'd like to live in, what impossible quests might we take on?  As I write, two pictures come to my mind's eye.  The first is of Mother Teresa walking onto the battlefield during one of the several Middle Eastern wars that have occurred during my lifetime.  It is said that this little sprite of a woman fearlessly walked onto the battlefield, and the guns stopped.  Most everyone would have thought that impossible, but she didn't know it was impossible.  Like Milo's quest, Mother Teresa's was possible because she decided it was possible.

The other picture that comes to mind is that of Jody Williams, a housewife turned activist, who was appalled by all the people who were killed or maimed by landmines left from wars.  For several years before her death, Diana, Princess of Wales, became an eloquent spokesperson for a coalition promoting an international treaty to disable the landmines.  Since its enactment, the treaty has been responsible for the disabling of over 46 million landmines.  An impossible task? Of course, but neither Jody Williams nor Princess Diana knew it was impossible, so it wasn't.

Instead of calling Forward Time Travel by that name, perhaps the term we should really use is stepping into our ability to make miracles.  Whether in our personal lives or on a global scale, when we travel forward in time and envision the world in which we'd like to live in the future, we step into miracles.  When we set about doing our parts to make them possible, we become Miracle Makers. 

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine anything I'd rather have in my obituary or on my headstone than "She was a Miracle Maker."  Today, just as each of us does, I begin etching that phrase by the acts--large and small--that I choose.

Only once have I asked readers to forward a blog post, and that was December's "Could we Change the World in 30 Days?" which launched the Grocery Store Game.  Today, I am asking it again.  Each of us knows "Miracle Makers" who need encouragement.  Each of us knows someone(s) who needs to live in the future where all things are possible so that they can change the world.  Please share this post and every bit of encouragement you can render.  There is so much we can do...when we choose it.

Step Inside a Memory

Last evening I was watching Neil deGrasse Tyson's mini-series "Cosmos." My head always spins at warp speed during that program: my brain reaching to understand what he just said before he jumps Universes to another thought. (Thank goodness for commercials.  I am not sure my brain could handle 60 minutes straight with Tyson.) 

Somewhere in last night's dizzying episode, Tyson said something that so pierced me with possibilities that my brain didn't even try to figure out the point he was making.

"Step inside a memory." 

I truly don't know where the rock-star astrophysicist went with that, but I just moved into my own Universe.  What a really cool concept!  Stepping inside a memory.  If I could step inside a memory, I could go back to all the special moments and all the important people of my life, again and again.  And if I could step inside a memory, I might even get a do-over on the times that didn't end up the way I wished they had.  I'm liking this idea a lot.

Yet even as I revelled in the possibilities of stepping inside a memory, I realized that miracle already exists.  As human beings we have the incredible ability to travel through time at any moment through our memories and imagination. 

A friend sent me a link to picture on the web of something we did together almost 30 years ago, and it was just like yesterday.  When I stepped inside that memory, I could see the sites and smell the smells as if I were there today.

My kitchen walls are covered with photographs of travel to Italy, and I can...and do...gaze on one occasionally...and just drift back in time.  I can taste that wild boar with chocolate in the rich, rich sauce with toasted pinenuts as if it were yesterday.  (Finest meal ever, I think.) I can remember the tenderness of a gaze and the gentleness of a touch as if it were yesterday. 

I can remember vigorous political conversations after dinner with my father who has been gone almost 30 years now, and it's funny to think about it, but as I step into that memory, I recall his smell. A mixture of tobacco that had gotten into his skin from years of smoking and grease from the machinery he worked on, muscling up through the bouquet of Irish Spring soap.  I am not sure I've ever consciously thought about that before, yet the smell is in my memory.

"Step inside a memory."

Step inside a memory, indeed.  What an awe-inspiring...and ever present...possibility!

Postal Time Travel

We are now down to two days until Christmas, and Postal Magic arrived in my mailbox today.  My mailbox is more appropriately sized for the volume of snail mail that we got two or three decades ago, so most days the single catalog or bill that I receive is lost in the space.

But, today...today...was a bonanza.  Most of my friends used the Saturday before Christmas to mail cards, and my mailbox was full today.  I couldn't even wait until I got to my apartment to start opening the cards.  One was from a colleague who retired 13 months ago: it reminded me how much I'd loved working with her.  I am also grateful to still have her in my life.  Another was from a colleague on a grueling work project five years ago.  If misery loves company, that is how we bonded. We laughed and commiserated over dinner and a glass of wine many evenings. I've moved to other employment, but we are still friends. 

Still another card came from a friend of almost 30 years.  As I opened it, I remembered cross-country skiing at Christmas in the mountains together 25 years ago. A few days ago, a card came from my college roommate from even longer ago. With it came memories of both of our weddings, one right before Christmas and the other in January.

I've written before about the powerful ability we have as human beings to "time travel"--to really be in another time and place through our memories.  I receive a few e-cards, but they don't match the magic of a card with a handwritten note that initiates time travel.  This evening after traveling over the years and the good times with my friends in my memories, it occurred to me how very important it is to be truly present to this year's celebrations for today I am making the memories that will fall out of cards 20 years in the future.