Your Reality Is YOUR Responsibility

A well-known fast foods chain aired a TV advert recently that shows a pottery wheel with a beautifully shaped clay pot perched on it, spinning and spinning around, with the potter nowhere in sight. As the wheel continues to spin, the clay begins to distort, losing its shape, until it suddenly goes flying off the wheel and lands on the floor in a shapeless lump of clay.

The first time I saw the advert, I was struck by how elegantly it compares with the way so many of us live our lives. (A compariso
I’m quite sure the fast foods chain is totally oblivious of.)

One of the most fundamental, key principles of life in our physical universe is that we create our own reality –- either by consciously, responsibly creating it, or by denying any responsibility and allowing it to just happen.

One way or the other, we have made a choice. We are responsible for the reality that is our life.

Whether the potter kept his hands on the pot, consciously controlling and shaping it into the beautiful outcome it had the potential to be, or he ran off and allowed it to go crashing to the floor while he went to “satisfy his fast food craving” – either way, he was directly responsible for the final outcome of the pot. He couldn’t blame the wheel, or the clay, or gravity.

Similarly, imagine you are the driver of the magnificent Bullet Train. You have two choices. You can keep both hands firmly on the controls, mind alert, eyes focused on the tracks ahead, guiding and controlling the train until it reaches your chosen destination. Or …

You can sit back, put your feet up and decide, since the tracks will take the train where it has to go anyway, there’s no point in you trying to control it –- until the train eventually goes careening off the tracks and ends up in a train wreck.

Either way – you are directly responsible for the outcome. Not the train. Not the tracks. You.

As you spin along on the wheel of life, or go down the tracks of your destiny, where are you? We can all consciously control our thoughts and feelings, our attitudes and beliefs and our choices and decisions to shape our life into the joyful, successful, abundant, fulfilling dream reality it should be, or ...

We can abandon control and deny we can do anything to influence our own outcomes. Deny we have any power to control or shape our life into what we want it to be and instead allow it to spin out of control, ending up as the “train wreck” of our worst nightmares.

Either way we have made a decision and chosen to act on that decision.

Either way we are responsible.

Eleanor Roosevelt is credited with saying – “If you believe you can, or you believe you can’t ... you’re right.” I’d like to extend that –- “If you believe you can have a life filled with abundance, joy, success and wonder, or you believe you can only have a life filled with struggle, lack, pain and despair ... you’re right.”