Self-Observation can be shocking

I’ve come to the conclusion that everything in my life is a dialogue between me and God. I assume that it is the same for other people, even though I only have access to my own experience. 

I know that this is not the way most people see their lives. I didn’t either until maybe a year or two ago. 

If you believe in the Law of Attraction, you might say that you attract the circumstances that you have in your life, usually by your beliefs, what you choose to focus on or your thoughts. Some also believe that reality is showing us who we are.

I believe that this last idea comes closer to the truth. It sounds much more like an interaction with a living being. 

To understand this line of thinking, you have to understand how long it took me to start seeing what was right in front of me with regards to my life. To see all my bad habits, egoistic ways of acting, hurtful words, irrationality, all the lies that I’ve been telling myself etcetera with something that even vaguely resembled clarity. 

The thing is that I actually thought that I knew myself. Now I know that, even though I had done some sincere soul searching, much of my self-image was based on a strange mixture of, among other things, ego-inflation, low self-esteem, self-deception and selective memory. When I look back at some of my justifications, unconscious or conscious, for some of my behavior, I can only exclaim: “What was I thinking?” 

But my past is in the past. I can do nothing about it and not accepting it is not going to help anyone. It’s my present, that which I have the power to change, that is the problem. I’m responsible for my current situation. All of it. I didn’t know it at the time, because I was unconscious of my actual circumstances. But the fact is that I in a sense forced God’s hand. God gave me exactly what I needed to show me who I was, but I kicked and screamed and resisted and here I am.

The important lesson here, is that when we shift focus from feeling like a victim of circumstances, to actually trying to see what they are trying to tell us, something happens. Because I’ve truly started to see how there is a lesson in all of the challenges that we face. ALL OF THEM! We might say to ourselves that a situation appeared because of circumstances that we had no control over. But, at least for me, I’ve noticed that there were always some bad choices prior to the situation that enabled it. I could have been more informed. I could have avoided a place that I knew was dangerous. I could have made more wise investments. I could have been nicer to a person whose help now would be valuable. I could have seen the reality of a situation, instead of making it into something that it was not inside my head. Etcetera. 

The good news is that now that I’m pretty okay with being where I am, even though my proverbial cards are more or less spread out on the table in front of me, I feel more capable than ever to make the changes that are necessary for me to be who I know that I can be.