“Your Focus Determines Your Reality”
(Making the Most of Decision Making)
I know we don’t give much weight to the fiction here at the Temple, but more than anything this week has taught me that. It’s a lesson I keep needing to relearn in various circumstances. One of my big dragons is my need to be “sure” or “need to be right” and it seems to pop up at the most unfortunate times. This week, there were two equally important (to me) sides to my dilemma and I felt like my sure decision, my right decision, rested on the fact that both sides were happy with me. If that wasn’t the case, I knew in my mind that that was the wrong decision. Hence the stress. I couldn’t reconcile the two sides.
Have you ever went to bed stressed and woke up the next day stressed? Or gone to bed with the immense feeling of your head under pressure and woke up with that same feeling the next day? So I have lived for about one week. And I’ll tell you something about stress. It narrows your focus to something like a pinhole. “White must win” feels like that. But that’s no way to live. For one, you can’t see the whole of whatever is in front of you and you are completely blind to what is behind you and on either of your sides. I have found that making decisions that way is a terrible way to operate.
Now that my “head under water” feeling has subsided, I’d like to share with you some things that I have learned.
Do, or Do Not, There is No Try
As opposed to the typical manner in which this is interpreted, I submit another. If you know what you ought to do, then do it, but if you don’t know, then don’t. In Finding Bobby Fisher, the main character’s chess teacher says “don’t move till you see it”. I take that to mean don’t move haphazardly because you think you ought to, because you feel a pressure to do so. In fact, moving under pressure causes missteps, miscalculations and some of those can have consequences of which we are not aware.
A few years ago, I used to participate in a similar site called Kharis Academy and in that particular praxium there was the belief that the Jedi operated under three codes: the “Yet” Code, the “No” Code and the “Skywalker” Code in that order. Faced with a call to action a Jedi was to move through each of those codes. Allow for emotion and peace to coexist, ignorance and knowledge to dwell together, chaos and harmony to sit at the same table, passion and serenity arise at the same time and death yet the Force to live in the same reality, for we are working out the details of the situation.
In the next phase, there is the “No” Code. You’re moving towards the decision now. As you consider all the details laid out before you, go through the Code. If you are still bogged down by emotion, don’t move. If you are unsure of the facts of the matter, don’t move. Most importantly, don’t reject facts out of hand because they don’t line up with your narrative. If passion and chaos are still ruling your mind as you look the matter over, don’t move and if you cannot feel the peace of the Force, don’t move. Don’t move until you see it.
Now we move to the final phase of decision making, the Skywalker Code, which basically asks “what is your, what is our, mission? The final step is to line your decision up with the mission. If it doesn’t line up, or you feel it may not line up, don’t move
“Breathe. Nothing Is Urgent”
This takes a considerable amount of time to work through. It's not an hour long or even a day long process. It is an “as long as it takes process” and we cannot rush it because we think a decision needs to be made now, now, now. No good decision can be made in the heat of the moment. “You will know when you are calm, at peace, passive”.
Maitre taught me the above when I became Pastor. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, especially as we feel we ought to be moving, ought to be doing, ought to, ought to, ought to. Whenever we feel that amount of pressure the only thing we ought to do is sit down somewhere and breathe.
May the Force Be With You All,
Ros
