photo credit: expose switch

How do you see the road ahead?

Can We See Our Way Through to Better Times?

Have you ever put on someone’s prescription glasses and suddenly gone dizzy?  Well I would suggest that’s how many of us are looking into the future – with lenses prescribed for the past.  And those glasses are making us feel disoriented.  There’s a mismatch between what we expect/want to see and what we actually see before us now.

So Many Trials & Tribulations

My niece recently wrote on Facebook, “Cancer sucks”.  And even though she hadn’t said it, most of our family thought “uh oh” and accurately assumed the worst – someone else in the family had just been diagnosed with cancer.  Another someone has begun the arduous and prayerful journey of hope and courage, fighting for his life.

PattiAnn recently wrote about her father’s ramble into dementia and her family’s plunge into quandary.  They are traveling an unmapped road, calling on their sibling resources to navigate the unknown territory ahead, doing their damnedest to do the right thing for their father and family.

And last week, in an evening workshop, I met 30 people who have, sometime in the last year or so, lost their jobs.  Despite their industrious and consistent job-search efforts, they’re still jobless.  But they’ve not given up.

You Could Add to the List

But let’s not go that route. Let’s just acknowledge: These are intimidating times fraught with hardships and challenges to home, hearth, health and heart.  Our world as we’ve known it has changed – this is not the “normal” we were expecting.

Answering the Question

Can we see our way to better times?  I say, YES we can.  But to do that, we need to own this time, this place and make NOW our “better times.”  I propose we’re in a new normal and we need to look at the road ahead (our new normal) through new lenses.

Telescopic Lenses – Look to Your Destination

We need to focus first on our long term goals – using telescopic lenses – to see a more distant future where we can achieve our “dream-goals”.  In an earlier post (Worst Case Planning Got You Down?), I suggested that even defensive pessimists could benefit from recognizing that “a miracle is always an option.”

So, wearing your telescopic lenses, create your Best Case Scenario.  Purposely see a promising future – one that can inspire your hopes and energy.  Literally, let that dream destination PULL you over and around your life-obstacles.

• The people who opted to continue the Career Strategies Workshop were doing just that.  They leaned into their futures, letting their dream pull them forward.
• PattiAnn and family met and brainstormed options for helping their father find a new, safe future.
• The newly diagnosed cancer patient looks to the possibility of a cure or, perhaps, remission.

Magnifying Glasses for the Small Stuff

Sometimes we need to use reading glasses that magnify – better still, make those “rose colored reading glasses” – so that we can see the small stuff that are our everyday spirit-lifters… the smile on someone’s face… the rose that smells so sweet… a happy giggle from a cute kid… the frisky puppy… the sugared popcorn that comes out just right… the brilliant solutions that make our lives simpler, things like band-aids and cell phones and fans and Google!

Focusing on the things that pull you into happiness will magnify the goodness in your now. And “Now” is really the only time we have.  When we make “now” joyous, we effectively create a good life, a happy life.

Computer Glasses for the Middle Ground

Yeah, there’s so much more to life between your small stuff and your long-term goals.  That’s that middle ground, the in-between.  Just as many of us need special lenses to read our computers, so too we may need different strategies for our middle grounds.

And, as PattiAnn pointed out in her recent post I’d Rather Be Talking, “80% of success is showing up…”

The Work Has to Be Done

For your middle ground, the ground between your small stuff and your dream-goals, you just gotta do the everyday efforts that will carry you to your goals:

• The career strategists will research and create marketing tools.  They’ll find and open doors to new opportunities.  And they’ll invent new ways to rejuvenate their energy on a daily basis.
• The family of an elder-body with dementia will see to the daily safety and care of the parent. And they’ll work to stay in communication thereby facilitating the care giving.
• The cancer patient will choose to undergo surgery, perhaps followed by chemo and/or radiation.  And he’ll find ways to keep his energy, his family life and his job on even keel as best he can.

Seeing Our Way to Better Times

I don’t know about you, but switching among all these glasses is making me dizzy! How about this instead: Let’s each of us craft our very own, personal version of blended lenses that reorient us and help us shift our gaze far, near and in-between with ease.

Imagine one seamless life looking through blended lenses that allow us to focus simultaneously on:

• Doing the work
• Stretching toward dreams
• Thriving on small, everyday joys

Get ready to transform this “new normal” into your “better times.”   You can make it happen.  You can.

How do you see the road ahead?