For Authentic Change, Make a List!
Make this list on a big sheet of paper of all the things you will do in the future to put you at peace. On the left side of the paper, number all of these goals. Be as specific and detailed as you can be. Predict how happy you will be when the list is completed. Picture yourself being happy. Take extra time thinking and adding to the list all of the ways that will make you a happy man or a happy woman. Predict how all your relationships will miraculously improve. Try to write down at least a hundred objectives to reach bliss and contentment. Go back over your list to make corrections, deletions, and/or additions.
Now that you have completed your prized list, with both hands, wad the paper (your list) into a ball and toss it in the trash. But why? Because…“You can not think your way out.” A happiness that does not last is not happiness. It may have lasted a day, a week, a month. Authentic happiness and change do not flip back to unhappiness. Just think, we have been making a list like this all our lives (on paper or in our minds) with no lasting results. We simply mislabeled whatever we were doing and called that happiness.
To be clear, a list of goals is just fine for earthly material things, but a psychological list of goals where you will ultimately be happy in some future is rubbish. You have been ‘a work in progress’ for years; how’s it going? Doesn’t it seem that with all that effort we should be further along? Honesty at all costs, even if looking at it pains you, which it will. This is what reveals a new path, an unknown path. In the unknown is where authentic happiness is. The mind likes to trick itself, so it can be lazy and not face the music. It is easier to lie to oneself.
“Do things the easy way, and you perpetuate the hard life. But do things the hard way, and you finally come to the easy life.” -Vernon Howard
For authentic happiness (change), there is nothing to do, but there is something to see. Seeing that we have been tricking ourselves is the beginning of an end to all our problems, concerns, and worries.
Vernon used to say, throw out all your beliefs and ideas for anything true cannot be lost. So if you work with Vernon’s ideas (truths) you might see you are building on top of an unreal foundation, an untrue idea. Real wisdom arrives only with hard, persistent work. Self-deception is much bigger than you think. Returning often to Now, this moment, becoming aware of yourself, for this is where you find gold, not thinking about some imaginary unreal future. Toss your list into the bin asap.