“What if you assumed [the best in all situations]? Life in all its mess and chaos, is worth living? And you giving up now would mean missing those beautiful parts you were meant to experience?” Megs.tea.room.  Clearly this question of “What if” is prevalent for us at this time…or at least for me.  It does come at a time of intense and significant change in my life, personally and professionally.  The answer to this question will determine a lot. It will determine where I am taking the helm and the priorities I’m changing.  It’s easy to throw up our hands and let things fall apart when they seem that way.  It’s easy to believe that there is no meaning. It takes strength to trust that there is a reason we can’t see.  It takes strength to work off of faith and what feels right.  There are some beautiful things that come out of crappy situations.  There is the saying “No mud, no lotus,” from Tich Nhat Hahn.  He says this in reference to suffering, meaning we have to go through it to get the result we are looking for.  I also look at this in the regard of what if—we can catastrophize all we want and believe the chaos is irrelevant but we can also ask ourselves what if we get through this and it’s even better than we imagine.  Suffering is in the mind and, frankly, it’s a relative thing. Everyone’s suffering is different—what causes pain for one is joy for another. The things we define as suffering now can create some of the most beautiful circumstances.  It’s up to us to find the beauty.

No matter what happens in this world, it is always a result based on our interaction with the situation, whatever it may be.  Our perspective and experience determine how we interpret and react.  Even doing nothing, the nothing is a result of our inaction.  That inaction was a choice.  We can choose to see the dark, the mud, or we can choose to see the light, the lotus.  When we stop half-way through, we get nothing, we get stuck.  So, my familiar refrain comes again: this is about mindset.  This is about how we choose, what we see, how we feel, and what we act on.  Reality doesn’t just occur—it may seem like an ever-present thing that we just respond to like it’s a series of random events we have to get through. In actuality, the world responds to us.  We decide.  We create the chaos in our minds but we also find the way to clean it up and make sense of it.  And sometimes we have to create the chaos so we can filter through and find what really matters.  But it is always a result of how we respond to what if, how we respond to what needs to be done, and what we choose to pick up to answer in the first place.  The questions and scenarios we answer determine where we focus.  If we give up halfway through and get stuck in the mud, we will never fully bloom.  Yes, some days we have to push harder.  Some days we get rained on.  But there comes the day when we breathe.  We stretch.  We feel the warmth of the sun and we remember why we went through it: To experience the creative force of being.