Are Things Getting Better or Worse?

What if the answer was up to you?

Turn on the news and the world is on fire, flooded, fighting, greedy, and broke.

Turn off the news and tell me about your life.

Will you tell me of the tragedy that has swept you up past all comprehension, breaking open your world and pulling you into a journey you never thought could happen to you?

Will you tell me of the soft secret pain in your heart, the hurt you look at but can’t seem to heal?

Will you tell me of the kindness of strangers and the deep connection to family, both original and your close created community?

Will you tell me you are lonely?

I love the work I get to do. I have been blessed in the last several months to have many heartfelt, revealing, and healing conversations with women of courage and depth, pain and hope, complexity and simple knowing.

And although I haven’t talked about it here before, in another part of my life I am an investor, an entrepreneur, an avid reader of The Economist, a deeply curious layman full of questions about the world economy.

So everyday I am engaged with the disasters and tragedies and innovations and hopes of the world, seen from a very casual, distant perspective.

And every day I am deeply and intimately engaged with the privately held hurts, passions, hopes and disappointments of my incredible clients.

This gives me a unique perspective, or lens, through which I see the world. More and more people are asking me these “Big” questions:

Where are we going?
Is the world safe?
Are people good?
Shall I hope?
Shall I act from that hope, or shall I defend and protect and prepare to grab my share?

Today I would like offer you my perspective, from many years of watching the world and having the great privledge of getting to see into the secret heart of so many people.

The choice is up to you.

Nothing is ever what it seems on the surface. Most of us strive to put forward a version of ourselves that glosses over where we hurt, what we dream, and how much courage and determination we have when faced with the choice to hope, to leap, to reach out.

Look around you. Can you tell whose knees, back, and teeth hurt? Can you tell which of the people in fancy houses have savings and which have debt? Can you tell who whispers secrets to their lover in the night and who likes awake, lonely?

What you assume from the surface is often wrong.

The power of my work is, at it’s most basic, the simple intention to hold my clients as resourceful. I see their magnificence, even when they can’t. And I know with absolute certainty that there is a path to Grace, to healing, to the softening of pain and the rekindling of hope, for absolutely everyone.

The story is always unfolding, and each moment we choose.

If you take the moment of time when the mother yells at her infuriatingly rude and flippant daughter, you miss the moments where she gets support for her own pain, learns new communication tools, and offers her daughter the Divine Gift of  loving her anyway. You miss seeing the mother reach out, knowing full well her heart could get trampled, her vulnerability dissed rather than recognized. You miss the moment the daughter feels the change, and invokes her own courage to choose to reach back.

If you keep your attention on the war, you miss the peace. If you keep your attention on the struggle, you miss the solution.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

None of us are the first to ask these questions, to fear for the future, to resist the changes and the support available to us.

What I want to remind you is that the power is always in the place that is bigger than the paradox. The healing is always in the willingness to see our pain and choose heart-felt over heart-protected.

Whether you are a Libiyan risking death to stand for change. Whether you are an activist learning to release your stand against another and invoke instead your passion for the core value that guides you. Whether you are a single person in a single moment choosing whether to see your self as victimized or resourceful.

What do you need to invoke your courage? What do you need to move beyond either/or and into your own capacity to hold more, peacefully?

What do you need to move into the place where you claim your life?

What becomes possible for you if you choose your magnificence? What becomes possible for the world?