Rejection is protection!

What?Rejection is protection! How can that be?  This is a saying in 12-step programs.  When someone rejects you, or your proposal, it is actually a sort of "whew...dodged that bullet!" because even though you wanted "it" or wanted a relationship with this person, your IDEA of what you would actually receive in the bargain was just that:  YOUR IDEA.  Not the reality of what would occur.This is one of the hardest passages of adulthood.  Recognizing that the voice inside our head, the strategic mind that tells us what it thinks is good and bad, is actually not what is wisest in us.  There is another voice, "that small still voice within" that knows more but often scares that strategic mind and so it shuts that voice down.  I have a long time friend, going on 3 decades.  She is a recovering alcoholic.  She told me once that first time she tried a 12 step program it didn't work.  The step (maybe first?) that asks you to surrender to your higher power?  Well, she really believed that "She was her higher power".  And I don't blame her.  First of all she might be the most competent person I know, and I know so many, that this is actually a huge complement.  Second, she grew up where there was no reason to trust any adult around her and every reason to assume she was the only person that was for her.  The only person she could trust and the only person who would protect her, was herself.But when she said it ("I always thought I was my higher power.")  my first thought was "She is just like me."  I too find it easier to trust my idea of what should happen instead of trusting "life" or "God" or even that small still voice deep within me that whispers, maybe it is better this way.  My strategic mind hates that voice.  It doubles down on its list of why things should be the way it thinks they should.For most of us our idea about a job, a marriage, really any endeavor we wish for ourselves never materializes that way.  It is always something different.  Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but always different.  So silly me, why do I really think I know what is best?  So, picture me raising my right hand and swearing:  "When the "no" comes, on any front, I resolve to recall all the times a "yes" made me unhappy and say "I probably just dodged a bullet, and I don't know why yet."  Care to join me?  

“The power of love upsets the order of things.”*

“The power of love upsets the order of things.”*For years men and women have written about “fate” and “destiny.”  From my perspective, fate represents a kind of unconsciousness or reactivity.  A bit like getting up each day and telling an 8 year old to make his bed, yet no bed is made.  You repeat the action the next day expecting different results, but alas, you get an unmade bed.  Then one day you do something different and get different results.  The day that you do something different I think you step off the wheel of fate and onto the path of destiny.  There is a momentum of sorts to fate, the power of lethargy or the status quo.  It is hard to think of something new and different to do, the seductiveness of unconscious or reactive actions looms large in all of our lives and therefore in all of our organizations, families and governments.Yet, the quote says, “The power of love upsets the order of things.”  I interpret the order of things to be “fate.”  To be “the way we have always done it.”  The order of things is conventional wisdom.  Please note it wasn’t always so; what is now “how we have always done it” or conventional wisdom was once the new idea that upset the order of things!  So, we might think of fate and destiny as two forces in life: fate being a current we must swim against in order to get to shore and destiny is shore.  Except this happens each moment.  So destiny is not static or “there.”  It is earned again in each moment.The power of love is the other important aspect of the quote.  We might substitute, energy, passion, or the random and unexpected for the word love.  What upsets fate and shifts us into destiny is more familiar to the Western mind as energy or passion.  How many lovers have thought to themselves in the original throes of the bloom of love, “I am a better me with my beloved.”  Or maybe, “I am the best me” with that person.  For love we risk being out of our comfort zone, because we love and because we feel loved.  And all of a sudden, the siren song of safety is not alive and running our lives, but rather the song of adventure and possibility.  In my view, that is exactly what we are here for: to come alive. And, the power of love will help us leave the path of fate and jump over to the path of destiny.“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  Howard Thurman *Quote from Genesis Rabbah LV8 and embedded in the text at this link:http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Akeda,%20Zach.htm.**Acknowledgement to 8.4.12 conversation with Bridget Boland and to James Hollis and his book, What Matters Most:  Living a More Considered Life, for informing my thinking on fate and destiny.