Threading Life's Rope With Your Needle

THREADING YOUR NEEDLE WITH LIFE’S ROPE
By Bill Cottringe
nnn A great challenge and opportunity we all have in life is to be successful in threading our needle with life’s rope. This is our main success quest behind all that we do. The keys to this quest are in understanding the rope, needle and threading process.

SEEING PAST WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT

To be successful in threading your needle with life’s rope, the first thing to do is get a clear picture of reality; and since reality is constantly evolving and there are so many distracting illusions, this can be one huge and difficult undertaking. Plus it runs counter to our bad habits of instant need gratification and impatience. Never-the-less, success at anything depends upon thorough understanding, no matter how long that takes.

The truth is that you may get the most accurate and complete picture of reality at the moment of your death and that may come as a one syllable, highly condensed experience. So in the meantime it may be smartest to be tentative and act as if you only have a partial picture, verifying and enlarging it as you go. This translates to the need of being a perpetual learner and means you should probably consider spending considerable time trying to understand the rope, needle and threading process before you proceed and of course many times afterwards too, as everything is really trial and error.

GETTING IN SYNC WITH LIFE

Lao Tzu said “In anything timing is everything.” This is one of life’s most simple and profound truths. It translates to the lesson that sometimes you may need to slow down and sometimes you may need to speed up. Or put another way, sometimes it is best to take the dog approach and make nothing of something, while other times it is better to adopt the cat approach and make something of nothing. Since time is our most precious resource and time management our biggest obstacle, we probably should quit wasting so much time on what we are currently doing and spend more on the next suggestion.

SEPARATING THE 5% SENSE FROM THE 95% NONSENSE

One of the main contributions of psychology is to educate us on how the brain tricks us into believing what we think we know is definitely so, when it is highly doubtful. To make matters worse, we can’t even rely on memory to effectively bring back something to put it to a truth test. Without giving much thought to it, we oversimplify complex realities artificially for usage and storage convenience.

The truth be known, 95% of what we fill our heads with is utter nonsense. To get a clearer picture of reality, we have to employee critical thinking to better judge the accuracy and completeness that our non truth-seeking brain is pulling in. For instance, what you see depends more on where you are doing the looking than what you are looking at. And because things are not always as they appear both the viewpoint and object can be wrong. That doesn’t leave much to be right.

STAYING BALANCED IN AN OUT-OF-BALANCE WORLD

It is becoming clearer that our world today is going through a major paradigm shift from one of predictability, regularity, security, familiarity and certainty to one of unpredictability, irregularity, insecurity, unfamiliarity and uncertainty. The first set of conditions are what we need to feel positive, safe, productive and enabling, whereas the second set breeds fear and negative emotionality, which in turn leads to unproductive, disabling behavior. Things are not moving in a propitious direction at all. Beware.

What this should tell us is that we would be smart to look for ways to counterbalance the negative effects from this dreadfully negative transformation. We can’t stop it any more than technology, but we can anticipate and minimize its harmful impact on us. And sometimes it is wiser to focus more on how we are trying to do something that on what we are trying to do, just like the next challenge that follows.

TURNING BABBLE INTO COMMUNICATION

Life and work are all about relationships. The main currency used to develop relationships is communication. It is a grave mistake to assume communication is good today because, the reality is that the opposite is true—babble rules. Without intense effort to speak and write supportively and avoid using any form of defensive communication, we are only making miscommunication and misunderstanding worse.

Success is easy when you convey reality in its original package, with its equality, freedom, honesty, tentativeness, empathy, humor, reverence, and positivism; failure is imminent when you inadvertently convey subtle forms of superiority, control, dishonesty, certainty, insensitivity, over-seriousness, rudeness and negativity. Paradoxically we start out trying to communicate all these other things before we have an adequate understanding of them; no wonder why we end up cluttering our minds with the 95% nonsense! Time to spring clean the attic.

TRANSLATING WHAT YOU WANT

Being crystal clear on what you want is a prerequisite of succeeding at asking for it and actually getting it. It is not uncommon for people to not know what they really want. But after all is said and done, don’t we all just want to love and be loved in our relationships and be successful and feel positive in doing our work?

If you think you want other things or have been told you need something else, you may want to write them down and ask yourself why you want or need these things. They may just be a means to the first two basic needs. Life is much simpler than we seem to want to make it. Of course you have to wade through a sea of chaos to get to that kind of authentic simplicity and you have to want to do that, first.

MOVING FROM SURVIVING TO THRIVING

Success in threading your needle with life’s rope occurs in two stages. First you have to work hard on developing your signature self—your best mental, physical, social, emotional, vocational and spiritual self. You need this best self to master the art of surviving in a chaotic world getting more uncertain by the moment.

This survival success experience is necessary to build the confidence you need to believe in and unleash the awesome potential and power you were born with and sadly forgot along the way. You are meant to be at the front of the line, but you can’t get there until you start at the back and work your way forward. That bit of humility is what starts the threading process in the right way.

Learn the art of sewing by doing the very things that help make up the results. These are resolving to be a perpetual learner, paying attention to the importance of timing, uncovering simple but true principles, staying balanced, improving communication, knowing what you really want and preparing your best self to explode forward with a very robust, long strand from life’s rope going gracefully through your needle. nnnnn