Adversity is the mother of intention
Adversity breeds innovation. It’s the only way it has ever happened, really. It’s generally not until our backs are up against a wall that we finally see the entirety of the room. Our options have slimmed down as of late. The room looks a bit empty. But if we choose, we might see that as good news.
There are now many examples of certain people, organizations and businesses that have found a way to create a stride for themselves during the pandemic. It’s important to recognize that what sets them apart is almost always about their deliberate choice to face this time by creating a new way, a new approach, to doing things without placing all their emotional effort on making it feel like it was before. They are adapting without looking backwards.
Others are using this time as an incubation toward new ideas entirely rather than evolving old ones. Testing the waters. Attempting to anticipate the needs of our society once the pandemic ends and pre-positioning themselves now for that future time. They aren’t seeking to rush it, but to let it all unfold.
How many people you know are planting gardens right now who haven’t really had the time to do so before? What do you think the ripple effect of that might be? Studies show that interacting with the earth makes us feel better. Imagine a whole bunch of people choosing to feel better at the same time through this method. Is there power in that? Most religious professionals and quantum physicists would say yes.
What are you doing about how you feel? Because how you feel matters. Instinctively, we are always striving to feel better. But how’s that going for you? Who do you want to be when the next chapter of our civilization finally arrives? Because now is the perfect time to start thinking about it.
Like it or not, we still have quite some time to go before life settles again. What are you doing with it toward how you feel? Because that is the fertilizer you’re feeding to your future garden right now. What ultimately grows will always depend upon how — or if — the soil is prepared.
There are both simple and complex ways of getting under the skin of our emotional states. Most of them should be approached with subtlety so as not to awaken our little inner editors telling us to back off or nothing to see here in a desperate effort to avoid self-reflection. Generally, the only way to do that is by not tackling these issues head-on, but by intentionally altering the environment to shift the tide gently toward the way you truly wish to feel.
Our environments, both energetic and literal, affect the way we feel in small but impactful ways. Choosing your environments purposefully as a therapeutic tool and decorating your own spaces with intentionality, literally, is prayer. Even your choice of a paint color is an opportunity to be intentional.
Your negative attitudes won’t even know what hit them. They won’t have been expecting you to silence them in such a sneaky way as changing the color in your bathroom, and adding that choice to a thousand other small ones, slowly inching their nagging voice into submission.
Now, why does this work? There may very well be a multidimensional cosmic or quantum-physics answer to that question that we probably can’t comprehend anyway. But there also might be nothing. It may be nothing more than a trick of our mind to use an object or a paint color as a symbolic representation of a higher idea, and because we spent so much time thinking about it, it happened. I don’t know about you, but that’s sufficient for me. Evaluate actual results, not expectations.
Our environments are not the only things that can serve as outlets for our intentionality. We often downplay our worthiness to ourselves subconsciously, but what if you told yourself otherwise, on purpose, through your actions and choices? Aren’t you worth feeling better? Then why not make choices on all the little things in ways that serve as the equivalent of making a wish? Those small choices, when made often and regularly, can incrementally have an impact on your brain chemistry in positive ways. Our brains are so suggestible, we might as well be the ones doing the suggesting. Suggest something amazing.
Use this time, as difficult as it is, as an opportunity for intentional growth. You don’t really have to do all that much to nudge the ship slowly toward a better destination. Most of it is accomplished by our attitude, which uniformly acts as a wind at the back of any intention, whether consciously good or subconsciously bad. You’ll typically get what you’re predominantly thinking about and feeling.
Choose not to only feel better, but to be innovative. Choose to have an eye out for new ways to approach things. Find little ways to be at ease with how things have become, making an assumption that to do so holds the best light to reveal things you’ve been looking for all along but just needed a little something on the order of a worldwide shutdown to make you finally see it. Or perhaps even think to look for it at all.
Choose to see the benevolence. You’ll get what you’re looking for.
Wil Darcangelo, M. Div., is the minister at First Parish UU Church of Fitchburg and at First Church of Christ Unitarian in Lancaster. He is the producer of The UU Virtual Church of Fitchburg and Lancaster on YouTube and host of the Our Common Dharma podcast series. Email wildarcangelo@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @wildarcangelo. His blog, Hopeful Thinking, can be found at www.hopefulthinkingworld. blogspot.com.