Kaleidoscope of Life

"When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change."

-- Max Planck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist              

Have you ever looked into a kaleidoscope?  Why are we intrigued by a tube filled with bits of mirror and glass? 

For me a kaleidoscope is a symbol of possibilities and potential.  The slightest movement brings a whole new image.  I can stare for a long time at a certain design that has been created, admiring the contrasts and the beauty.  Or I might slowly roll the tube watching the shapes tumble over one another constantly changing and reinventing themselves into something new.

Different parts of our lives, certain people, certain thoughts, certain beliefs - hold greater and lesser significance at different times in our lives.  Like the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope they may tumble in and out of our line of vision and therefore in and out of our consciousness.   

Whatever you put your attention on you create more of.  If you are unhappy with the way something in your life is going, the more you put your attention on what you don't like... the more it persists.  Try changing the way you look at it.  Try focusing your attention on what you do want instead of what you don't want.   You can see the situation totally differently by a small turn of the kaleidoscope.  The pieces can fall into a whole new pattern.

If you are looking at a situation and cannot quite see how it can work or how you can make it become a reality, remember the kaleidoscope.  All of the pieces are there all along, what you need to create the new vision is within you.  It may simply require looking at it in a new way.

In Janet Attwood's Passion Test she states there are three steps to changing or acquiring anything.  Intention - Attention  - No Tension.  She describes this as first getting clear on what it is you want - be careful here not to get caught in being clear on what you don't want.  Then to place your attention on what it is you want, visualize it.  Keep your desire in the forefront by writing it out and placing it somewhere you will see it daily.  I believe that an important part of visualization is the emotion you attach to it.  How will you feel when you have your desire fulfilled?  And then let it go- No Tension.  If you are constantly perseverating on what you want, you are not living in the present.  This goes along with Mike Dooley's suggestion as well to visualize for no more than five or ten minutes per day on your desires then release them.

Go about living in the now, knowing that the Kaleidoscope of Life is tumbling all of the little pieces into place to create the magnificent pattern that is your destiny.

                                         "Life is not a problem to be solved
                                but a mystery to be lived."  -- Alexander Pope