Take Chances

Take chances, my love. Take the plunge into the unknown. Take a chance on love, on art, on speaking out, on shining bright, on quitting something old, on creating something new, on following your passion, on your crazy idea.

Take chances. At this point, what the hell have you got to lose? The earth is turning into a fireball because day after day after day after day, people played it safe and kept acting out the same old predictable patterns again and again and again.

The old patterns have failed, my love. The old ways of doing things have failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. We stand now on a dying planet staring our own extinction in the face, and we're afraid to take chances because, what? Something could go wrong? It's already gone wrong, my love! It's gone as wrong as it could possibly go!

So take chances. If there is any hope of pulling up and away from the numerous disasters looming on our horizon, it isn't going to come from following our old patterns. It isn't going to come from the same tired old spinning wheels which brought us to this point. It's going to have to come from the unfamiliar. The unknown. The unknowable. The unpredictable. It's going to have to come from so far outside our old patterns that it will astonish everyone when it arrives.

Be courageous. Fear will come, because fear always comes with any leap into the unknown, but be courageous enough to feel that fear fully, all the way through, and keep moving. Move confidently in the certainty that you are doing something truly heroic, because if anything is going to save us, it will necessarily involve a radical shift outside of the familiar pathways which brought us to this point. You are a hero. Be certain of it.

You already have some idea what I'm talking about here. If you don't, sit with it a bit; it'll come. Those doors you've wanted to open but you haven't because of fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of instability, fear of uncertainty, fear of fear. Start there.

Start there, but (and here is where a lot of people go wrong) don't bring your old patterns to your leap into the new. Don't put new wine in old wineskins. Be courageous not just with your actions, but with your thinking and perceiving. Allow unprecedented ideas to come in from outside your old repetitive thought loops, allowing you to improvise an approach to opening your new doors in a way that suits your new trajectory instead of your old one. Be courageous enough to relinquish old thinking patterns and allow inspiration to bubble up from completely unanticipated directions, undaunted by its unfamiliarity. Be courageous enough to bring unconscious conditioned defense strategies and childhood fears into consciousness, so that you can stop being a slave to them.

Follow your inspired desire. Not desire for the gratification of indulging an old conditioned pattern, not the desires you think you ought to have, not desires you may have had once but don't anymore, not a mental image, but the deep, felt desire for a step in the direction of freedom, expansiveness, aliveness and exuberance. Let your inspired desire siren you into whatever new form you need to take to move through the next new door. Let it pull you out of your old patterns and into a humble, responsive relationship with a new way of being that you know you do not understand.

Be playful. We didn't get here for want of trying, we got here because we tried too hard. We overthought it; we used our tiny tinker brains instead of allowing the whole wisdom of our being to guide us. When you think in circles, the fresh new ground you seek will not be found by more thinking. Feel your way around with your guts, your heart, your imagination. Let life unfold like a treasure hunt with clues hidden behind every smile. Greet people with fresh eyes and an open heart like Alice, curious about what they have to offer you and what you have to give them. Be open to beauty. Let it guide you.

Be gentle with yourself. You have tried so hard my love, turning the same old wheels over and over again, and it's taken its toll. Give yourself a little pat on the heart and say to yourself, "There, there." Replace self-punishment with self-nourishment and your patterns will disappear. Nurture your soul. Mother yourself. You are every bit as deserving of love as those that you love so intensely. Love yourself like you are your own beloved and dissolve the patterns created by self-punishment.

This is how you save the world, my love. Every step you take into the light and away from humanity's ancient patterns is a step away from extinction and toward utopia. We are all interconnected, so taking leaps into the unknown will bring the unknown into the world. The gaps you leave where your old patterns used to be are gaps through which potentiality can now pour into the entirety of our species. People in your life who are accustomed to their old patterns, and to having your old patterns to bounce them off of, may find this disappearance distressing. Their distress is an attachment to the familiar. Be compassionate toward it, but also be aware that it is what's going to get us all killed.

Take chances. The gift of our impending annihilation is that there's no longer anywhere left to fall to, no longer anything left to lose. This is it. We've taken the old ways as far as they can go, and now we will evolve, or we will die. Evolution means change. Change means a movement away from the old ways. That movement starts with you. Take chances.

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