Happy

Allow me to start off with a few hypotheticals. Say your mind is buzzing with new ideas and you’re looking for ways to make your creativity the foundation for a thriving and successful career. You decide you want to purchase a computer that will help you extend your mind; an assistant, who will clarify and magnify your ideas.

You go to the store, buy the beautiful machine, come home, unpack it, connect the wires, and flip the switch…

Unfortunately, what you find is not an empty machine, with an operating system ready for you to input your ideas and help shape your world based on your own vision…The factory has stuffed so many preset programs in your Apple or PC that you have trouble utilizing it in the way you had envisioned.

Say that some eighty percent of the hard drive has been programmed in such a way that every time you type in a word, bells go off and synonymous terms come up, only these are not synonymous at all, they are interpretations, put in by a programmer who was born and raised in a very different culture and a different time, with very different notions of value, opportunity, danger, and risk assessment. As a result, every time you think of ways to expand your creative mind or business, and you type in words linked to that idea, (words like ‘expansion’, ‘money’, ‘power’, ‘love’, ‘abundance’), warning lights come on, and the functioning of your computer is dramatically impaired. Wouldn’t you get so frustrated that you’d be tempted to smash this beautiful and powerful computer against the wall? Or, would you instead start paying attention to the information that pops up on your screen, and slowly but surely, begin adapting your own thoughts and actions to all these warning signs?

You may never have looked at your brain as a malfunctioning computer, plagued by many insidious viruses, like a paralyzed television watcher who has no ability to discern the difference between objective news and an infomercial. But the data that science has turned out over the last ten years show that our brain doesn’t just function like a computer, it is a computer. The most significant information that shapes our perception of the world, of its opportunities or its dangers, in other words, our impulse to go for expansion or for protection, was formed and hard wired in our brain while we were still in the womb. Nature had a very good and intelligent reason for doing this…In case something happened to the mother, and she could not personally teach us survival skills, our defense mechanisms would already have been activated.

The thing is, the human animal is not just an animal. It is not just about survival. The human animal has the potential to be a creative being, with its own unique operating system, able to shape new worlds, new ideas, new inventions, new chairs, paintings, buildings, clothes.

In these uncertain times, and period of great upheaval, it is tempting for the brain to get confused by the sounds of deconstruction. It is very appealing to walk back, deep into the cave of the ancient hard-wired survival brain. And huddled around the fire with some other cave people, one may find a vague sense of comfort. But creativity won’t be found in this place. Any sense of safety will be short-lived and very thin.

So, for the creative entrepreneur, the fashion or furniture designer, the composer, the writer, or the artist, these are challenging but rewarding times. If we can look at the turmoil in the world as nothing more than a remodeling project, and if we peak over our shoulder into history, and understand that every period of turbulence is always followed by a time of opportunity and expansion, you will find that it is not panic and survival instinct that save the day; but the courage to stay present, look at life as a journey and trust that somehow, mysteriously, everything will, in the end, work out for the better.

It may be helpful to conclude this investigation by asking: “When was I ever not taken care of?” Granted, we may sometimes receive less than what we asked for. The words of the great philosopher Mick Jagger come to mind, who sang that while one cannot always get what one wants, if one tries sometime, one may get what one needs.

For anyone who is reading this, and these words would, logically, be directed to that very person, chances are, you are alive. That is a good start, and a fundamentally different state from not being alive.

We may not be happy with the position of the life we are in, we may be stressed, feel we don’t have enough time, or too much time, or not enough capital. All these sensations are indicators, warning lights on the dashboard, signals to alert us that the true engine behind our lives, the creative heart, needs to be heard. If we can muster up the courage to bypass all the old panicked voices and listen, it will guide us into new, exciting territories. And we may end up getting more than what we ever asked for.