Changing Our Thinking

For a large portion of my life the phrase from Ernest Holmes was paramount - Change your thinking, change your life.

It now seems to me that most ideas about life are true to a point, but not always and without end. Say you start going East and never change your course. Eventually, you will be in the West because we live on a globe.

If I change my thinking, some things can change, but not all things. I cannot become 7 feet tall or younger or be able to leap 30 feet into the air from earth, at least on my own without the aid of some invention. Changing from being a negative person to a positive person can have a profound effect and make life much more enjoyable for sure. But it won't necessarily make us rich or beyond the reach of germs. It's not a magic wand as some have and do teach.

So often I have heard someone say - What have you been thinking? in reaction to someone's difficulty, as if thinking made all disasters come true. I do think our thinking is important and an ingredient in our life experiences. For example, you didn't create the tornado, but your thinking, or lack of it, led you to move into tornado alley where tornados are most likely to happen. And we can change how we think about things, giving them a new name and an encouraging spin, asking ourselves what possible good can come out of this______, whatever it is. What can I learn? How can I do it differently next time? etc.

Some of our thinking needs to be reviewed, updated, and aimed in a new direction. As the old saying goes - If you don't change your direction, you are likely to end up where you are headed. I think, when we stop for a moment of honesty, we can discern the fruit of what we are thinking and doing and decide if that is the fruit we truly want.

We may not be able to change everything by our thinking, but we can change a lot and make life much more wonderful.