You Have a Choice

This is a follow up to last week's "Negativity" blog.Once you know you are in charge of the interpretation of what happens in your life, you have a choice at every event about the charge you want to put on it.Like atomic particles these charges can be positive, negative, or neutral.Alchemists change one thing into another, lead into gold.  You are an alchemist of life.  This alchemy is the power to transform your daily events.All you need to do when something happens is to choose the charge you will give it.  Even if you don’t know why it is good, or what the importance or meaning is of an event, you can always wonder from the positive perspective: “I wonder why this is what is supposed to happen” or “Why is this good?”  When you start looking for the reason, you will probably find it.My dad always said, “For every loss there is a corresponding win.”  What is your win?We have the alchemical power to transform our world.At the Mountain Experience I read some of Rosa Luxembourg’s writings from prison, in the book, Eye Witness To History, by John CareyHere I am lying in a dark cell upon a mattress hard as stone.  The building has its usual churchyard quiet, so that one might as well be already entombed; through the window there falls across the bed a glint of light from the lamp, which burns all night in front of the prison.  At intervals I can hear faintly in the distance the noise of a passing train or close at hand the dry cough of the prison guard as in his heavy boots, he takes a few slow strides to stretch his limbs.  The grind of the gravel beneath his feet has so hopeless a sound that all the weariness and futility of existence seems to be radiated thereby into the damp and gloomy night.  I lie here alone and in silence, enveloped in the manifold black wrappings of darkness, tedium, unfreedom, and winter - and yet my heart beats with an immeasurable and incomprehensible inner joy, just as if I were moving in the brilliant sunshine across a flowery mead.  And in the darkness I smile at life, as if I were the possessor of a charm that would enable me to transform all that is evil and tragical into serenity and happiness.  But when I search my mind for the cause of this joy, I find there is no cause, and can only laugh at myself — I believe that the key to the riddle is simply life itself, this deep darkness of night is soft and beautiful as velvet, if only one looks at it in the right way.  The grind of the damp gravel beneath the slow and heavy tread of a prison guard is likewise a lovely little song of life - for one who has ears to hear.If Rosa can do it, we all can.Inquiry:Take something, anything that happened today, and speak about from all three charge states.  Give it a negative, then a neutral, then a positive charge.  It could be a fun dinner table game for sharing as a family.