Let Go and Live the Adventure

One of the things I've learned about manifestation over the years is that you can't always control everything that happen around you. What you can control is your attitude toward it.

In some sense, the fact that I suffered from depression was a gift because it pushed me to seek a path to happiness, joy, and bliss. But that doesn't mean that I feel happy all the time. Sometimes things happen that are out of my control and don't make me feel happy. Yet, even then, one can have an underlying feeling of bliss, which the Buddhists call "equanimity."

Years ago, in a desperate attempt to escape the pain I was in, I began to study Buddhism. I've probably read hundreds of books on Buddhism, but I finally came to the conclusion that the central message can be boiled down to this: let go.

Once you do that, it can significantly change your experience of life. As my mother describes it, it's like sitting by a river watching the boats float by. You can sit and observe, or you can choose to get on a boat. The important thing is understanding that it's a choice. If you choose to get on one of the boats, you can also choose to get off, which means that life becomes an adventure, an exploration.

I like to think of life as a trip down the Amazon River, though Paulo Coelho's image of life as pilgrimage is good too. The important thing to understand is that the geographic location of the journey is not what matters. You could be on the Amazon River; you could be on the trail to Santiago de Compostella. Or, like myself, you could be on 11th Avenue in Denver, Colorado.

Who decided that 11th Avenue in Denver, Colorado is any less exotic, exciting, and adventurous than Spain or the Amazon? Or maybe I should ask, Why would anyone decide that? What criteria did they use? It seems completely arbitrary to me.

The geographical location doesn't matter. The costume you wear doesn't matter. What makes an experience into an adventure is one's frame of mind.