In a conversation with a friend this morning I found myself in the usual position of offering my take on an observation about daily life, and realizing simultaneously, that I was actually talking to myself. I was saying something about the resolutions we all make to change some aspect of our life, in this case regarding an over-all plan for directional change; I realized what I was offering was advice that I would do well to apply to myself. And, the advice I was offering was eminently do-able.

Start by changing my big plan into a little plan that I can do now.

If I want to explore the potentials that my current ideas are pointing out to me, then why don’t I start by taking the time right now, to arrange a moment today, for me to sit down and compose myself and try to gather inward and be still enough to see, if I can state the situation, problem or hope in the form of a question. The simpler the better.

It seems paramount to first ask. Why? What is my motive?

That is a complex question and needs to be addressed as to why am I engaged in a process to make myself feel better? Isn’t all desire for change based on dissatisfaction with the current moment of state of affairs, health, wealth, etc?

In that frame of exploration I put into motion a process that tends more towards awareness than mere satisfaction, or the old standby of change-for-the sake-of-change. Just sitting still regularly gives us about all we can handle regarding the unrelenting and sometime torrential fact of everything changing, even when we least want it too.

Yes, we end up in deep territory when we openly explore our wanting something that’s better than what we have; and we can also end up in new territory where we can see further and clearer than ever before.

Not a bad spot to be in if we want to explore our future plans, hopes and designs from a more realistic and truer place.

So, slowing down and examining our present seems a sound foundation for looking towards the future, which we can’t examine as such, yet a sense of our truer place in the wider array of things seems helpful and somewhat practical and difficult.

Going carefully means also knowing where we’ve been and not being stuck there.

If I do not know where

I have been there is no

Way to know where I

Am going. Nor the

Reason why.

The path I am on

Does provide a clue,

Going slowly and

Seeing where I step,

A path is just a Way

With a Where and Why?

A process, not Event.