The Direction of Intention

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Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“History is a fable agreed upon. So too is identity, which is a story not only arrived at by the individual but conferred by the group. There has to be both a public and private coherence to the story of our self.” John Lahr

I’m helping Amy with her graduate project. She is getting a master’s degree of science in Creative Studies. The science of creativity! Her project is a performance piece, a one-woman show that traces the choices that brought her to this incredible study and what she has so far found there.

One of the passages in her play explores how we dynamically draw a future toward us by the way we story ourselves in the present. And, how we very rarely live in the present because we are seeing and storying this moment through a category we created in the past. Do you see the dilemma? Marshall Mcluhan said it best,  “We drive into the future using only the rearview mirror.”

It is necessary to a point; you have to somehow locate yourself to know who you are, what you believe, and why you are here. What you imagine is what you create. What you imagine is defined by the categories you created in the past. What you are capable of doing or not doing, what you believe is possible or not possible, what you fear or think will fulfill you, what is your purpose? All of these questions are rooted in your experiences and how you interpret them.

Ellen Langer tells us that humans are really good at creating categories – it is necessary for language acquisition. And, one of the key to presence and the creation of a more expansive future is to consciously challenge the categories that you’ve constructed. The great gift of being natural category makers is that we can consciously create new ones.

To what categories from your past are you attached? Can you re-story your past (you are doing this anyway – a topic for another day) to create a new category called wholeness? Imagine the future you will unfold when you’ve created that category!

Imagine the future you will unfold when you can extend that category to everyone you meet.

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