ARE YOU A SURVIVOR?

Financial consultants can help you with your money problems. Consignment stores can supply used clothing, shoes, and other useful items. Perhaps you can find a roofer who will establish a payment schedule for the repair work. This will help you to survive materially. But have you noticed that your hopes and positive attitude were crashed with the stock market?

We’ve all gone a bit too far thinking that running fast and acting fast will help us become more creditworthy. Maybe that really does happen in the movies. In this crumbling economy, we’re running for cover: back to our porches, back to late-night dinners around the dining room table, back to short-distance driving, shopping for cheaper goods, and searching for bargains and items. low priced at the grocery store.

TODAY’S CHALLENGES

What if you could change your life for the better, not just by finding the right roofer, budgeting, or ditching the restaurant, vacations, and recreational activities that you once enjoyed but can’t afford now? If you can begin to “see” your life differently, your life will improve. That means changing your definitions of things and broadening your vision. That means moving to unfamiliar and possibly uncomfortable areas. But these changes can improve your outlook. They can enrich your daily pattern of life and erase the darkness and anxiety that come with the challenges many face today due to foreclosures, layoffs, inability to make bill payments, rethink education options for your children, and see your family. and friendly relationships are degraded by these challenges.

CHANGE DEFINITIONS

There is another way to create wealth, not financial, but starting with the mind. It is a creative stimulation that travels to your productive self and activates your entire brain, so that ultimately you have all your resources to achieve the best life possible. If you base your daily decisions and reactions on generic definitions and meanings that you have had for years, it is like moving a body of water forward by slowly moving from one small stone to another. It will take you a long time to cross that water. But if you can challenge those definitions you’ve held in place for so long and start changing them, it will ultimately be like diving off the dock and swimming across the lake.

CHOOSE HOW YOU SEE

An artist trying to represent a theme faces the responsibility of interpreting that theme. Let’s say the artist is painting a still life: three oranges, a porcelain jug on a linen tablecloth. How will the artist paint them? What oils will be chosen? Will there be great attention to detail or will objects be somehow abstracted for modification? The artist is totally free to use a personal perspective and represent that perspective accurately and convincingly on canvas. Every brushstroke works towards that goal. A successful painting will represent the subject as the artist intended it to be and this work will enlighten the viewer about the artist’s perspective and the interpretation of that perspective.

So what does this have to do with a person who is not an artist and how would this method be of value to them? Using a creative approach, just like an artist paints, will help anyone redefine what is important to survival. That’s how. Many times, especially as we get older, we define things in a certain way and we stick to that definition quite a bit because it seems like that’s what makes our world solid. In other words, we have a lot of things in our lives “settled”.

CUP HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY?

For example, you may always want a beautiful lawn because your dad had a beautiful lawn and that became an established standard for you. Your bank balance may tell you that it is no longer affordable to retain the landscaping company that has kept your lawn beautiful for the past five years. So you call them and discontinue their service. He is sad, because he thinks he is getting poor, now that he is laid off and the gardening service will be just one of the many services and situations that he will have to cancel in his life. You may get depressed at this perspective, or you may see the “theme” of your front yard in a different way. It is up to you to interpret the things that happen in your life. If you view gardening service cancellation as another sad journey to bankruptcy and ruin, then it will undoubtedly become the scenario that will instruct your life to proceed that way.

What if you decide that even though you can’t have your lawn the way you’ve always wanted it, you have other options: You can, for example, apply a scratch coat by laying down shrubs and mulch and reducing the high-maintenance lawn factor? . You can make the decision to live with the lawn as it is and not worry about it. You can decide to do the yard work yourself. It would be a good exercise and now that you have time …

Whatever your decision, you have migrated from an established definition “must have a beautiful lawn” to “zeroscape” or whatever option you have chosen. You are in control, you are fully responsible for your decision, you will not get depressed because you cannot have something, but work to fill that void with something else. Your proactive decision is a brushstroke that works toward wonderful creative work.

REALITY: IS LIFE A PAINTING?

Yes. Life is like a painting. Let’s go back to the lawn stage. He has stopped the landscaping company services and has opted for zeroscape. You study zeroscaping on the internet and start changing your front yard. In three months you have completed the project and are quite happy with the results, especially when the summer brings hot and dry weather, the neighbors’ sprinklers are working overtime and you are sitting on your porch overlooking the glistening green bushes, Deeply mulched, drought-resistant flowers and Small patches of very green drip-watered grass. The landscape you’ve created only happened because you didn’t give in to your old ideas, that is, “If I can’t make a big green lawn like everyone else, I’m broke. I’m lazy, misfit, I’m broke.”

Is this very different from an artist who goes out into the forest, sets up the easel and puts what is in front of him on a canvas? Each brushstroke is a decision to change what we call “reality” into a “reality” on the canvas. If the artist is successful in achieving the desired results, then the painting is good because it does what the artists wanted to do.

Go back to your front yard. When you chose to change it according to what you wanted, every effort worked towards that goal and you created the “reality” you wanted. And it was also successful. You achieved, with your effort, what the artist did with brushstrokes on a canvas. Perhaps you will say that the front yard is more real than the painting. Consider the power of the mind as a reality. In each case, something changed for a decision and, in that sense, the reality of the painting and the reality of the front yard are the same. Both were changed, one for his zeroscaping work and the other for the artist’s brushstrokes.

PAINT YOUR LIFE!

If you can see the relationship these two actions have, you can see that you have the power to challenge every definition you have. The real power lies in changing those definitions that seem to be destroying your world or negatively affecting it. You must ask yourself, at that point, how you can change it, how you can change the negative for the positive. It is true that this is not a new philosophy of self-help, however, relating it to the creative experience is a different angle. Different because creative thinking is positive thinking in the sense that it has the power to change the definitions that affect our lives for the better. So paint your life! Paint what you don’t want by changing your definitions and paint what you do want by applying physical and mental action. Let the challenges of these times be a canvas for the masterpiece of your life!