INEXPERIENCE / FEAR

All of us have to deal with a frustratingly unimaginative inner soothsayer. Dreaming up the future often seems somehow beyond them. Like new episodes of most TV shows their visions seem like re-arrangements of past successes, or even past failures that didn’t end up in the show being cancelled.

To meet life’s challenges

We move forward in life drawing on predictable ways of doing things in order to meet life’s challenges. Often this works but inevitably a point arrives when running away from shadows, for example, because they look like monsters, needs to be addressed. A helpful adult showing a very suspicious child that there are no monsters as the end of the bed usually results in the banishing of thoughts of monsters … but what if there is no adult like this to hand? What if a person keeps going avoiding things, not only shadows, because of how they predict things will go?

In-built failure

Doing things differently is regularly necessary if you are to adapt to life as it happens, rather than remain faithful to it as it has happened. When you don’t adapt, things fail: relationships, investments, gardens, entertainment, they all stand still and begin to perish. Entropy does its job when no new energy arrives.

Unfortunately, turning your back on your inner seer can feel much like displeasing the gods (even if you don’t believe in them). The more difficult your life has been the more pronounced this feeling may be. Alternatively, if life’s been very hard, you may have evolved a way of doing it that’s almost the opposite of this.  You might be the kind of person who throws caution to the winds, and in your profound self-sufficiency meet other forms of disaster.

Be open to invention

Keep looking for opportunities to lighten up your inner soothsayer. Ground what you do in learning, thinking, and conversations with people who have a variety of points of view. The more narrow your points of reference are, the more closed off to invention you will become.