FLITE

Welcome back to my vision of who we are.  In my last blog I described the center of the spiral.  Today I will be discussing the forces that swirl around us impacting us in all areas of our lives.  I see five; focus, love, imagination, time and energy.  Since I enjoy playing with letters I have combined them into an appropriate word: Flite. Yes I know there is no such word but in this age of texting I’ve also noted that it doesn’t really matter.

This is how I feel

I am hidden within the picture

but there are too many distractions

Focus is both created by you and creates you.  What you experience in your life will tell your brain what areas to target for you while it drops the rest.  By placing the spotlight on that one area, you become unaware of other possibilities.  An image my family is sick to death of explains this.  Everyone knows what a tree is, yet no one sees a tree the same way.  I see the overall shape of a tree, an engineer probably looks at the structure of the tree and a photographer might see the tree in relationship to the surrounding environment while a fine artist sees the details of the leaves, stems, trunks and roots.  Other individuals will see how they can use the tree.  I’m afraid I have to disagree with Shakespeare; a rose by any other name may not smell as sweet because that is determined by how you sense it.  Besides I am sure somewhere that some scientist has managed to link a bad smell with a rose just to prove that he can.

If you want to change who you are, one step is to change what you choose to focus on.  That is a lot harder to do than to write the statement.  At the moment I have two brown horses cropping the grass outside my window.  What I see are horses.  But what would happen if instead I looked only at the shape of their shadows.  It is early afternoon so the shadows are foreshortened and right beside them.  At one moment I saw a box with something moving at the back of it.  A moment later and it was a different shape.  Perhaps I look at the horses and see only the rippling tide of their brown skin.  What name works for that?

The many ways love can impact our life has been enumerated most notably by Elizabeth Barret Browning and a German band called Natural.

www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15384‎

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Me_Count_the_Ways_(Natural_song)‎

In each case they were talking about the love between people.  There are many variations of that particular love; parent/child and vice versa, best friends, first responders. But love is not just between people. Your particular passion is an expression of love.  The sense of relaxation that can be found when you are experiencing nature is another form of love.  My cats love me and I respond.  I’ve heard it said that people with dogs or for that matter any pet feel the same way.  People who have a deep faith in something have a love relationship.

When an individual of any age experiences a severe lack of love their physical health and their desire to live are seriously affected.  This tells me that this particular element of our life is a basic necessity.  If that were not enough every single article, magazine or book that even touches on the idea of improvement starts off with helping others.  The gift economy movement has taken off around the world.  Any spinning of my particular spiral is going to have to find a way to tap into this.  I am reasonably good about expressing love to those in my close circle.  Reaching out to strangers has proven to be a bit harder.

Imagination is the next force swirling around us.  I have had a great deal of difficulty with this one.  For a very large part of my life, I defined imagination as the prerogative of artists of any kind and those individuals who somehow were able to create completely new ideas or products.  Notice I separate these two.  I, of course, was neither. Recently I have come to the realization that imagination is far more.  That in fact every single person who exists uses imagination daily.  Some, however, like me do not recognize it.

Most parents/caregivers (of any age) are able to determine exactly what the other person wants despite the fact that others cannot.  This requires imagination.  Whatever you do at work I know that it requires imagination whether you are figuring out what your boss, colleagues, employees or customers actually want or how you will produce it.  Any planning or organizing that you do implies that you are imagining the future.  This blog (actually the entire internet network on whatever device) is a mental concept that has no reality.  Yet there are a whole lot of people in this world who are using it as a valid means of communication. Let’s go back further.  Abstract thought, which this definitely is classed as, is a sign of imagination.  So is the number zero.  That first group of primates that left the trees for the plains, for whatever reason, had to conceive of the idea long before they actually did it.  That is what imagination is, the thought that comes before.  It is the thought that is fuelling this part of my journey.

Time likes to play games with us. At one point it is linear following the path from Past to Present to Future or, if you’re a physicist, going from order to entropy along the arrow of time.  My body also seems to be moving from order to entropy.  At other times, it is a circle (at least according to the Lion King).  As you might have guessed by now, I prefer the concept of a spiral but even with that time is still moving in one direction.

Personal time has nothing to do with any of that.  Personal time is dictated by our feelings.  Every one of us has experienced those hours that pass like minutes and minutes that last for an eternity.  Age has also affected time.  When I remember something from my past, I notice that time seems to have compressed.  At one point, I knew the exact moment of the event, then the year, now the event happened sometime within 2 or 3 years.  As I watched my children grow up, it seemed that they lived two years to my one or maybe that was just me refusing to age myself.

Spiritual time is also very different.  Regardless of what type of book you get your information from, they all agree that spiritual time and physical time are radically different.  After all the word eternal describes the non-physical world.

Time then is a necessary factor, but it is one that changes constantly.  Perhaps the trick is to change with it depending on your focus.

Energy is the last force I am talking about today.  Like time energy varies.  There is the energy of the stars which created, with the help of gravity or because of gravity, the world(s) as we know it (them). There is our personal energy.  This is dependent on the fuel we provide our bodies and the joy or lack thereof for what we are doing.  There is also stress energy.  By this I mean the adrenaline which is pumped into our bodies allowing us to flee or fight; be acclaimed as heroes or be a live jackal.  Unfortunately a lot of us live with stress for a long time.  Apparently like anything else too much energy is not a good thing.  Spiritual energy exists but how it is defined appears to be open to a great deal of debate.

When I combine FLITE with brain, body and spirit I see a description of who and what we are.  If we wish to change and I do at least some part of that combination has to be altered.  For every person that exists in this world there is a different way to do that.  I am greedy.  I want it all. In Wonders of the Universe, Brian Cox describes the solar system as being created by spin.  It requires a very fast spin to change the landscape be it stars or tornado.  I intend to speed up my spin and see what happens. Perhaps I will just take flight.

Enjoy your time.