Today's quotation:

Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential.  Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible for you to do.

Pope John XXIII

Today's Meditation:

I've spent most of my life focusing on my fears and my frustrations, guided more by my ideas of my limitations rather than my potential.  As more things went "wrong" for me as I was growing up, I grew in this tendency and focused even less and less on my hopes and dreams.  After all, other people's hopes and dreams came true, but definitely not mine.  This was really silly.

I know now that my focus on my fears was what caused most of my fears to become reality.  When I met someone I was interested in, for example, I feared that the relationship would never last-- and guess what?  I spent my time focused on that fear and did my best to force things to happen that would make it last, and that was a strategy that was doomed to failure from the beginning.

Now I know that my failures are learning experiences, and I usually don't allow them to determine how I act in new situations.  I say "usually" because I find that such a dramatic change is something that works gradually.  I tend now, though, to focus on my potential to make my hopes and dreams come true, on the possibilities in my life rather than on the limitations.  If I want to do something now, I focus on finding ways of doing it rather than on things that I think will go wrong to prevent me from doing it.

And it's that focus that allows things to happen.  That focus is the energy that we create, the energy of possibility and potential-- and that energy is positive energy that helps us to create the things we want and need, to make things happen that we wish to have happen.  If I believe it can happen and act that way, then it can happen.  It's that simple.

I wish I had known this years ago. . . .

For further thought:

To be ambitious for wealth, and yet always expecting to be poor, to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for, is like trying to reach east by traveling west. . . . No matter how hard you work for success, if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavors, and make success impossible.

Charles Baudouin

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