Succeed by seeing the invisible.

     "He's got eyes in the back of his head."
     The Hindus talk about "the third eye."
     And then there's "second sight" or clairvoyance.
     And some people sleep with their eyes open (and so clearly, the ability to see is not solely in the eyeball).
     In other words, there is a lot of information out there (granted, many would call it speculation) that we can see more, perceive more than what we can just with our senses. And I think we can.

Always right on the edge of success yet no further?

     It's maddening—being right on the edge of succeeding and yet never breaking through. Here's a quote from Deepak Chopra:

...we were created to achieve our aspirations rather than simply circle them.

     And one from the golfer Arnold Palmer:

I wasn't going to live a life of dear and near misses.

     One more (for the younger generation) from the musical group Faith No More's song "Epic":

You want it all but you can't have it/ It's in your face but you can't grab it

     So one thing is clear—the frustration of being close but shut out of success is brutal. But what can you do about it?

If you try to please everybody you'll end up a nobody.

     Everybody wants you to be a certain way. "Be like Mike" was a slogan for a TV commercial. Your parents want you to live this way. Your friends want you to live another. So and so didn't like that you did this. This one didn't like that.
     If you lived the way everybody wanted you to live, you would be out of your mind in no time flat.

On people who are always late.

     Politics aside, they say President Clinton (and this may have to be updated in a couple of years to be clear about which one) was always late to appointments, whereas President George W. Bush was always impeccably on time. The speculation went that Clinton made people wait to show them who the 'big dog' was, who had the most power. It was a message.
     But what sort of message does being chronically late send?

Are we boring ourselves to death?

          I can't tell you how many times I've heard my little nephews and niece say: "It's boring." To them it seems like anything that's not online is boring, including sunsets, nature and life. "It's boring." "That's boring." "I don't wanna go. It'll be boring." A popular song by Collective Soul called "Run" has the lyrics:

Are these times contagious? I've never been this bored before

     So is this the "age of boredom"? Do we need some flashing technological bauble, some racy movie, non-stop 4th of July fireworks to hold our interest?
     Or are we boring ourselves?

Do we have spiritual radar? (Can we know what's coming?)

     I wonder sometimes. Remember the days before radar? How you'd just listen to the radio and they'd say: 'Today there's a 50% chance of rain.' Well, what the heck does that tell you? Now we click on our live Doppler radar screens on the Internet and see just about every raindrop there is to be seen. But what about our spiritual lives? Can we have "radar" there too? Can we sense what's coming around the corner for us?

Afraid to make a mistake?

     Ah! The world will come to an end if you do! That's the way I used to think anyway. Not anymore. Funny, yesterday I touched on mistakes and then last night I came across all this stuff about mistakes. So, being an expert on this subjekt (yes, I made a MISTAKE),  here goes.

How would you live if you could live your life over again?

     That's the entire premise of a novel called Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by the Russian writer P.D. Ouspensky. It's a fascinating book and I won't give away the ending in case any of you decide to read it. But suffice it to say it's quite a surprising conclusion Ouspensky comes to.
     So what about you? How would you live if you could live your life over again?

Frustration is a killer.

     Anybody dealing with frustration out there? Man, I feel like I've been enduring enough frustration for ten million lifetimes. You know, isn't it supposed to be that life gets easier as you go along? I don't know, sometimes it really doesn't seem that way. It's like the question I'm thinking is, when is it going to get better? When am I going to be able to breathe a little easier? When will life cease to be such a struggle.

The only way out is through.

     Wouldn't it be nice if we could dodge our pain? I'd love it. And we really try to convince ourselves that we can, don't we? But there's a deeper part of us that knows we can't.
     But can we really embrace our pain? Doesn't that seem masochistic? Well, no actually, because what you can do is not embrace your pain but embrace the results that come from embracing your pain.

Where are you at in the tunnel?

    Everybody knows the analogy. Life is like a tunnel. You just have to keep chipping away until you break through to the other side? But how do you know where you're at in the tunnel? And if you knew, would you want to continue? ("You have five thousand MILES to go.") So hefting one shovelful of dirt after another, exhausted, surrounded by darkness, what do you do?

Okay, so it's all clear now, right? We go for it!

     Or do we? Don't we have to back off sometimes. I know I'm usually like "maximum effort all of the time!" But hey, I'm realistic too.
     The wonderful NY Times columnist and author the late Christopher Hitchens said one of his guiding slogans was: 'if it doesn't kill me, it makes me stronger.' But when he contracted a fatal illness and his body and strength wore down he realized that his slogan didn't hold.
     So what's the answer?