Reality Has No Agenda - Grasshopper
“Why did this happen to me?”
That’s a question a lot of us ask when we bump up against reality.
There’s really no satisfying answer – because reality doesn’t take sides. It has no bias. It’s just pure truth.
If you’re a person of faith, you might say, “Well, it was God’s plan.”
I don’t happen to believe God has a predestined plan for us. I believe he, she, or it – pick your pronoun – gave us one tool that’s absolutely necessary to take on reality. More on that in a moment.
Reality – to be better understood – can easily be translated into the world we live in. We exist in a sphere of reality. And just like we can’t see the world spinning on its axis, even though science tells us it does, we also can’t see the ever-presentness of reality. It’s everywhere, all the time.
So how do we deal with this often challenging phenomenon? Answer: we respond to it.
What we usually do, though, is react to its presence.
That means we try to justify or deny what’s happening – instead of accepting it as fact. When we do that, we’re part of the “flat earth” crowd – true believers with both feet firmly planted in the clouds.
Response is a gift that’s been given to us.
Reactions only have one option – to do what we did last time. But when we respond to reality, we create options – options that give us choices, instead of repeating the same old reaction again.
We’ve all heard the term “stimulus–response.” It’s actually mislabeled.
It’s more accurate to say, “stimulus–reaction,” or even “reality–reaction.”
Think of reaction like an actor doing another take because the lighting wasn’t right. They have to re-act – do the same thing again.
It’s eye-opening to realize how much of our life runs on automatic pilot because of conditioned reactions.
And it’s life-changing when we learn to respond to reality instead.
That shift gives us the ability to create options – instead of sailing off the edge of the earth again.
All the best,
John
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