We’ve had a new president for five days. Has anything really changed? Many of us felt more hopeful watching the inauguration, but what about now? Has that hope lingered?
It’s hard to keep hope alive. It’s hard to stay positive, especially when nothing seems to change – or at least not to change quickly or quickly enough for our liking.
The slow process of change in the United States, indeed in the world, can be likened to the slow process of change in our lives that often causes us to give up hope. We try hard to create change, to have faith that our efforts will actually manifest new, different and better conditions in our lives, but when that doesn’t happen quickly enough, we give up. We lose faith. We lose hope.
When my husband would tell me that the human potential, personal growth, metaphysical,ย and spiritual tools we had learned together didn’t work, I would criticize him. I’d say,ย “You don’t use them long enough for them to have an effect. You have to stick with them long enough for them to work, to see the results. You give up too soon.” I’m talking about things like positive thinking, deliberate and conscious creation techniques, affirmations, creative visualizations, tools like those in books such asThe Secret, or my own The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation.
I, however, must be honest. I could be criticized for doing the same – not practicing these tools long enough. I get frustrated and disappointed and give up, too. Oh, I may stay positive. I may keep on visualizing and feeling “as if” my dreams have already come true, but there are days – even days on end – when my hope fades and I am depressed. At those times, I stop truly having hope or faith. I tinge my efforts with disbelief on some very fundamental level.
And when that happens, I fail to do the one thing truly necessary. I fail to act. I fail to do the “practice,” whether that means reciting affirmations, creatively visualizing my goals achieved, combining my thoughts and feelings, giving unconditionally, or simply taking an inspired (or not-so-inspired) action towards creating what I desire.
In my case, since I would like to have my ideas come to fruition in the form of published books, maybe I just don’t bother sending out the query letters or proposals. I may not consciously decide not to bother, but I just don’t do it. I must admit that I have at least one proposal that has been sitting around for two years. It’s not going to get published that way. A literary agent or an acquisions editor in a publishing house has to see the proposal for it toย get published. ย But when my first efforts didn’t pan out,ย I lost hope. I went on to other projects. I failed to continue acting in a way that would help me achieve my dreams – both by focusing on what I wanted to create and by acting in a manner that would help me manifest that goal.
As the country settles into the reality that a new president doesn’t mean instant change, we run the risk of falling back into despair and hopelessness. We risk feeling depressed, fearful and lethargic. If we know that change often takes time, we can, instead, all look at our dreams and goals for this new year and acknowleddge that achieving these things – like any change – is a process that can take time. Sometimes, change does, indeed, happen instantaneously. We think about what we want, we imagine our dream manifest, and, low and behold, it appears before us. Our life is changed in some way miraculously (or not…since this is, as they say, the Law of Attraction). But more often, we have to continue the process of thinking, feeling, acting…and hoping and having faith…while the different aspects of change line up andย fall into place, until one day change happens.
Until then, we have to maintain hope and faith in the process of change. Our new President, Barak Obama, did not promise us instant change, although our society expects everything to come quickly. He cautioned us that we needed to expect change to take time and effort and courage. He was speaking about the change necessary for our nation. The same holds true for the change each and every one of us wants to create in our lives.
[I welcome comments on my blog posts. Please feel free to post them here. Some of you choose to contact me personally via email, but the other readers would benefit from reading your comments as well. I, of course, love to hear what you are thinking and to read your reactions to what I have written.]
