It never ceases to amaze me just how everything can change and yet things are entirely the same.

I guess what I’m talking about here is how quickly the world that lives in your mind can change. It can go from focusing so much on one thing…and then…SNAP…it changes to something else completely.

What’s even stranger is the the other world disappears entirely.

I wonder at times how many worlds exist in my mind? How many have come and gone? This really has me thinking this afternoon. It has me thinking about just how much power I have over what is actually in my control.

That may sound like a bit of a strange concept…the idea of power over what is in your control, but I know that there have been many many times where I’ve had the skill to do something but not the ability.

And I think there’s a big realization there. We often want to do something but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the current capacity to do it. I tend to look at situations that happen out in the world this way as well.

As much as I couldn’t grasp this when I was younger, I really do believe in good timing.

I used to think that things, with enough effort, could be “made to happen.” But, as time has gone on, I really have started to see the world as a gigantic ebb and flow of waves. Even more, I’ve realized the analogy of the “kid on the swing” is incredibly powerful. If you push at the wrong time…disaster strikes.

But if you push at the right time, there’s hardly any effort involved.

This has been running through my mind and changing the way I’ve been doing things. It makes me understand patience very well. It makes me understand, really, that patience is one of the marks of someone who truly is showing up in the world as how it actually is. When you are impatient, you are trying to make things happen forcibly…

And that never really works.

Patience and trust. Talk about a huge chapter of my life.

There have been things that have happened in my life lately that has started to put new fine and blood into me. They’ve given me the energy to pick things back up and move forward again.

I never really viewed the period I went through as disaster. In fact, I saw it as quite the opposite. But some things really did need to take the back-burner for a while. There were things that needed my dire attention and I gave them all of the attention they needed. While I wasn’t necessarily happy with pausing some of my plans…I am glad that I did.

So it was a pause.

And now I’m pressing play again.

& just like that…everything changed.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project