© Another Day in the Country
I was in my early 30s when I heard it for the first time. “You create your own life,” I read and couldn’t quite believe it. “Surely not,” I muttered. And yet in my early 20s I’d wondered why some people seemed to have more bad things happening to them than others. Was there really something in this universe of ours called The Law of Attraction?
Being a curious, word-hungry, knowledge-seeking sort, I kept searching for more information about choices that we make, who is in charge, and our destiny. That’s probably one of the nicest things about being older — the knowledge one acquires with experience and a certain wisdom to go along with it — after all, us oldsters have been around long enough to see patterns in our own lives.
In church, I was taught the Law of God — the 10 Commandments — and I was convinced that following those commands would assist me in creating a good life. It worked! I also learned the Golden Rule and purposed to live by it. That helped. And I took to heart another Biblical admonition that the greatest commandment of all is to love. But I hadn’t caught on to the concept of The Law of Attraction — it’s even beyond the By Beholding We Become Changed Law because it suggests that we attract things into our lives by our thoughts, our desires, and our choices.
It was a nudge in the right direction, following the Golden Rule, a moral code — all good things, but the idea of creating my future and the power of my desire, was still a long way off. And yet, I’ve come to believe that every day, in every choice we make, we are creating our future existence. Now, if we could just teach this concept to our youngsters, we could literally change the world.
When the Industrial Era came into existence with its mass production spewing noxious chemicals into the air, they had no notion of ALL the ways they were creating their future and that of their children. When Henry Ford put his cars on the assembly line, he only saw the good in his invention I suppose, and couldn’t conceive of the damage to the environment. When cigarettes became fashionable, even given free to our troops, there was no label on the package that said, “These could be harmful to your health.”
Look how many years it took for a pattern to develop and someone to say, “Those things aren’t good for you!” And then how long it took for anyone to dare to say, “And they aren’t good for the rest of us, either.” As a child, one of my strongest memories is the smell of my Grandma Schubert’s house. When I got older, I realized it was a combination of coffee and tobacco smoke. At any family gathering, the air was blue with smoke and no one knew for a moment they were endangering their own health and that of these children. They were simply making choices and didn’t know those choices were creating their lives with eventual cancer, emphysema, and heart disease.
Enough about the past. What about today? What choices are you making today that create your life. What about, “Choose what you think?” and the tremendous power of positive thought. How about, “Choose carefully what you eat?” How long does it take for us to really get the concept that our bodies react to what we eat and that our health is impacted by our thoughts?
Right now, this minute, as I write, I’m choosing my future, by how I think, how I act, the water I drink, the air I breathe, how often I brush my teeth, whether I learn to floss correctly or not, how I sit in this chair, how much sleep I had last night, whether or not I exercise regularly, what I read, how much television I watch, my dreams and desires — the list goes on and on of all these choices that I make, minute by minute.
It’s another day in the country, starting now, be aware of the choices you make and what kinds of things you are attracting into your life by the simple act of choosing. Here goes … if I want to be limber when I’m 80, I’m signing off now to do yoga.