Life, The Universe and Everything

I love my new job.  People seem genuinely surprised every time they ask me how I am, as I now always have something positive to say.  They look stumped when I gush about how much I’m loving life, as if they simply hadn’t prepared themselves for the conversation to take that turn.  At first that upset me...It made me realise I’d spent the last few years being a miserable bitch, wondering why good things were happening to everyone else, and never to me.  Now though I look at things in a different light.

I suppose I’ve always been a dreamer, but I’ve rarely been able to fulfill those dreams.  I haven’t had the conviction to really put the hard work into whatever has been required of me, to achieve the goals I’ve set myself.  It’s not an uncommon problem; many of us will set ourselves New Year’s resolutions which never come to fruition.  I’ve never spent much time wondering why that is, I’ve simply focused on the fact that it’s another one of those things I’ve let myself down on.

A colleague recently gave me a DVD to watch called The Secret, she insisted I watch it as it was her “go to” DVD whenever she needed a lift.  When I started watching it, I admit the first few minutes elicited an eye-roll or two from me, as I realised this wasn’t a heart warming rom-com or drama, but...well...it was a self help DVD...or at least what I imagine a self help book would be like if it was turned into a DVD.  It talked about The Laws of Attraction and how the universe will conspire to bring us what we focus on, be it good or bad.  The power of thought and feeling alone can bring you everything your heart desires, but also if you focus on the negatives; it can bring you those as well!

Now my brother’s and I have discussed religion at great length in the past (a subject that as a rule I steer clear of with anyone else).  Despite being raised in the Catholic faith in our early years, and educated in Catholic schools, my brothers have all ended up staunch atheists.  They scoff at the idea of organised religion and the idea of an omnipotent deity. 

 

 I on the other hand have remained fairly agnostic.  I can see why people like to have faith, and I would never dream of telling someone their beliefs are wrong.  For my mind I have always felt that I just don’t know.  My reasoning for this has always been that whilst I find the idea of God sitting up there looking down on us, shaking his head and judging us all decidedly unrealistic, I've never ruled the guy out 100% because there have been a few things in my life that I have prayed for...and when I have...I have been given them (spooky).

The first thing I remember praying for was for my dad to get custody of my brothers and me when I was about ten years old.  I hated boarding school and desperately wanted him to be granted full custody so that we could live with him and attend a normal school, where I’d be able to go home every evening.  Every night I would lie in bed with my hands clasped together and my eyes clamped shut, and I prayed and bargained with the mysterious guy up in the clouds to grant me my wish.  When I was eleven we left boarding school to move in with our dad.  My prayer had been answered.

The second thing I prayed for was for my friend Rebecca to find her Mr Right.  I’ve never had any worries about any of my friends finding their soul mates, and starting the families they all dream of having.  With Rebecca though, I prayed for the timing of her “moment”.  I honestly worried that she’d started convincing herself it would be okay if she had to go it alone, and that she’d started closing herself off to the idea of meeting someone. I prayed hard that her time would come sooner rather than later.  Now she has a beautiful baby boy, and gets married next March.  I get so emotional over Rebecca’s little bundle of joy...from the moment she announced her pregnancy, through to the day he arrived (way too early) on the planet, and even now when I look at him just chilling out on his play mat.  I’m not an emotional woman, so all I can think is that it’s because of how hard I had hoped and longed for him and his daddy to arrive in Rebecca’s life and it just gets me a little choked.

The DVD I watched talks about getting what you project through thoughts and feelings.  For instance if you are troubled by debt and you think and pray to get out of debt, then your focus is on the debt, so all you’ll get back from the universe is more debt.  However if you think and pray for wealth, then the universe will conspire to bring you wealth, for instance through an unexpected windfall, or a better paid job that allows you to dig yourself out of that hole.  When I think about my new job, and how I decided that I wanted to move into training, I focused on how I was going to do it, and how to go about re-training so that I could move into my chosen career. I never focused on the negative.  I was determined that I would get there somehow, and whilst I never prayed for it, I longed for it, and out of the blue one day, I got a call from the company I work for, who happened to have a CV that I’d sent through speculatively more than a year previously.

Could it be that the universe, conspired to give me a route into my dream job?  I hadn't prayed for it, I'd simply planned for it to happen.  If that’s true then surely I answered my own prayers before too?  The idea is that because I’m intrinsically linked to this earth, and this universe I took control of my own future and the universe just gave me a helping hand.  Religion and weird self help DVD's aside (!!), I think I kinda like the idea that we carve our own paths through life, and that faith in ourselves and our own abilities could bring real inner peace.  It makes me hopeful for all the other things I want in life.  Also - Just think – what could we achieve as a race with all that positive thinking? It's a bit deep for a Sunday evening, but it's something for you to think on people. Dream big and dream happy!