Stop resisting things that work

Difficulties may appear to happen. We can each discover we have inner resources. Take the risk to survive your perceived adversity. Paths you define teach you how to live in more meaningful ways. It's not that you forget how to take risks. Some people just never choose to learn how. You may resist doing things you sense are truly necessary. Next time you tell yourself you're too busy to do what you you'd rather, stop and think what you're really saying. Learn to read between the lines. You may have forgotten what it means to be honest with yourself.

Choose instead to be brave. Reflect on your life and discern where and when you've taken risks and where you've chosen to avoid them. Do you recall experiences where you learned to take risks to love and encourage others or, to take risks to feel encouragement? Some of those risks you took will not have turned out as you hoped. Yet, all outcomes from all experiences enable you to get in touch with yourself. What have you learned? Take risks to listen and help yourself while you also serve others.

Did you ever think you were meant to get off track in order that you would develop the skills to live a more fulfilling life? If you stumbled onto a material fortune and had all your needs and dreams satisfied, taking risks to lose it all might become your primary source of motivation. Is our task to learn to trust ourselves and others? to take chances and experience vulnerability? joy and pain? Why are you here?

Some people take steps to teach themselves the true meaning of impermanence. It requires risk to define and lead a life of instability. Other people strive to reinforce permanence, legacy and physical reality. No matter what your choices, you take risks to learn how to live. As you find ways to help yourself, your inner wisdom grows. As you learn to listen to yourself, other people may begin to learn from you and take their own risks. Once you stop resisting what it means to feel more alive, you'll take risks to set yourself free. The degree and nature of freedom are totally up to you.

Realize what you already do

Success is grounded in your own understanding of your perception and values. As you evolve to willingly give up or change many values you thought you had, you will grow to acknowledge some of your beliefs were misguided. You slowly remove your own smokescreen. You come to realize you hinder success, you create it, you are it.

For example, you may be a person who always thought you were an individual of principle and that your views would guide the evolution of your whole life. What you said here isn't entirely wrong. However, to admit assumptions about what you see as 'right and wrong,' 'acceptable or unacceptable' or 'desirable and undesirable' don't change, is a way of postponing your own sense of success.  Did you know that?

Consider that somewhere in your past, you might have adamantly said that you wouldn't do something you knew someone else did. Your position was a judgement, based on how you saw yourself and the world at that time. Years later, you may have decided to do precisely what that person did, because you saw your life differently and you felt ready to evolve and change. That change of heart wouldn't mean your original view was wrong.  In fact, it was appropriate for you at that period. Its unfair to judge your lack of a sense of success today on yesterday's decisions. Everything we do is part of a process to shape our own attitude.

I know a farmer's daughter convinced from childhood she would grow up to become a farmer's wife. She felt happy in the country and chose to learn as much as she could about farms. When her neighbour's daughter grew and moved to the city, the girl sensed she could never do such a thing to her parents, or abandon her country life. Yet, over time, as her self-awareness grew, she decided to attend university away. She became a large animal veternarian and now works on farms throughout her home state. Her view of a desirable life evolved and her decisions caught up.

We each experience different kinds of success exactly where we are. As we choose to grow and change our minds about things, we acknowledge that somewhere deep inside what we knew what we were doing before wasn't quite right. Yet, our past is necessary to understand who we are in the present. In your heart, you recognize that change is inevitable, but your choices in life may initially resist what you seek because you desire to learn in body, mind and soul. All parts of you do not perceive and understand success in the same ways.

Success for the physical body may be defined by doing what it takes to survive where you are, to get enough food, water, shelter and to experience pleasure.  Success for the soul may involve taking steps to learn and helping you come to better know your deepest self. The soul doesn't require what the physical body requires. Your mind defines success by its own experience, sense of time and space. Each part of you abides in the realm of the relative. You may sense a disconnect between achieving success in different parts of you. Success is also achieved in just being here now.

Get over self-indulgence

You may seek to experience more peace and harmony within yourself, and yet, be unwilling to admit, examine or address what isn't working.  This isn't simply a question of what isn't going your way.  Re-assess what other people tell you isn't evolving in appropriate directions.  Even if you disagree with others, your attention may be drawn to areas of your perception or beliefs you hadn't thought about before.  What benefits could you see in all of this?  Its useful to look beyond your own envisaged outcomes to see how you could be enhancing or hurting the lives of others, in ways you hadn't anticipated.  How would that knowledge make you feel?

At this point in your life, you need to be willing to perceive and assess your behavior in new ways.  Adaptability reminds you different forms of adjustment exist.  Consider attitude, perception, and willingness.  You function and make choices that define a certain quality of life.  You go places, see people, and embrace activities with a degree of freedom.  You have continued to make choices which enable you to maintain that quality of life, or at least, you have made valiant efforts.  So, how would you know things weren't working? and after all, not working for whom?

1) Your lifestyle isn't sustainable.  You may realize deep down that you spend more than you earn. Its a vicious circle to use credit cards to pay other credit card bills.  Remortgaging or borrowing from 'Peter to pay back Paul' isn't reducing your debt.  Your choices do the opposite.  Sustainable living creates a circling back to functionality. You need to realize taking all trees from your lot and not replanting, won't leave anything for next time. Greed has negative repercussions. It's not just you in the 'here and now' who is affected by your choices. You teach by example and you deprive others when you hoard. Imbalance may lead to a change in the scales, not simply by creditors, who auction your belongings, but also by environmental crises, as ecosytsems adjust in order to survive.  These hints imply your behavior and desires for ownership may be distorted.

2) You lack clarity.  A concrete sense of direction is missing.  Underneath it all, you desire lucidity.  As you evolve into a clearer state of mind, you'll no longer feel lost or confused.  You can't ignore wrongdoing or a sense that you may have gone to far.  You can't change the past, but you control what you decide now.  No behaviors are coincidental.  You may go to extremes because you feel disconnected to the world and your true self or, you're initially blind to the consequences.  You simply need to grasp how your mind offers you clues to set things right.    

3) You're ready to admit the truth.  Events have unfolded in such a way as to empower you to notice the world around you is evolving.  You come to recognize you have been changing your own rules to get what you want, and the world has responded by depriving you. To feel you possess people, things and situations you hope will remain in your life, suddenly strikes you as inappropriate. The fear of losing what you cherish has led you to seek to hold far too tightly.   

4. You realize your view of security has been too rigid. You begin to recognize that raising your own awareness of your present reality reveals what you have to do.  Its time to develop courage to go against the staus quo, to behave differently than you have done before.  Your fear of losing what you think you have has taught you that you don't posess anything. You only care for people and things for the time necessary for you to learn what they really symbolize and tell you about yourself. 

Predicting waves: a job for satellites

When people are asked to imagine a dream escape, they often envisage a scenic, remote island. At times, I've thought of Tahiti myself, in a rustic bungalow built on stilts over water. I have no modern gadgets, and focus on finishing a book, meditating or snorkeling before a meal. Images of dream destinations are often enhanced by satellite images of maps and detailed close ups. 

As we take a break from the life we know, and imagine where we're not, we seek to disconnect from our typical reality. Tourists caught in tsunamis are often focused on anything but a pending disaster. Even local people are caught off guard in Japan, Pacific Islands, Thailand, Sri Lanka and other places that have been hit. Just because you have a phone, tv, radio or Internet doesn't guarantee warning. The existence of tsunamis in modern days is largely unknown before it hits.

Back in 2000, during some of my research on the impact of El Nino in the south pacific coastal region of South America, I'd seen and heard proposals for warning systems on buoys, sensors and satellites. This wasn't immediately dismissed as impossible, but cost was viewed as prohibitive by government and industry. There existed a lack of collective will, lack of desire to spend or to be proactive. Key actors prefer to respond to a crisis and then, disband to focus on other matters.

Since the 2004 tsunami which caused the deaths of 300,000 people in the southeastern pacific, governments of coastline nations have agreed on the urgency for a global tsunami warning system. They do not agree, however, on who will pay for manufacturing, installing and monitoring it. I think more now about people on islands without communication equipment. Although money has been spent by leaders on new sensors and radios, I decided to review satellite buoy warning systems and how they had been mplemented since my initial view of the technology.

In case you're unaware, tsunamis mainly evolve from huge quakes. A global network of sensors already exists to detect and measure seismic activity. Yet, not all ocean quakes lead to massive waves. Available seismic data doesn't tell you much on the direction or speed of incoming waves. Where some regional tsunami warning systems draw only from seismic data, such systems aren’t trusted. The only way to confirm if a tsunami is brewing is to observe moving waves close-up. Tsunamis initially appear small at the surface, even near a quake’s epicenter. The height may be as low as a few centimeters. Only as waves approach land do they swell to frightening sizes. This trait makes detection hard, requiring high-tech equipment.

The first method used to supplement seismic data was taking readings from tide gauges. Although some tide gauges are very sophisticated, many are basic mechanical devices that measure height of a float protected from waves by an enclosure called a stilling well. Because tide measurements require a fixed point of reference, tide gauges are normally installed on or near a coast. They're easily accesible for maintenance and sensors there are only really useful for a short distance. The question of how many buoys would be necessary for a comprehensive global system, where they would be placed, how they would be maintained and by whom, remain unanswered questions. Sounds like a situation for a United Nations of space affairs, yet such an entity doesn't yet exist.

A more direct way of detecting tsunamis out at sea is to measure pressure changes on the ocean floor. The Deep-ocen assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) program, is now used in the Pacific ocean. Bottom-mounted sensors detect changes in pressure known for a typical tsunami. The sensors relay the information via sonar to a buoy floating on the ocean surface. Buoys, in turn, transmit the data to a satellite, which relays data to ground-based stations for processing. DART does improve speed and accuracy of tsunami warnings. The downside is existing sensors and buoys are prone to failure and must be serviced or replaced lots. Experts agree there aren't enough specialized buoys or satellites to monitor all oceans.

Nice to know there's always hope. Tsunamis at sea are invisible to an eye, but radar satellites will detect them, if pointed in the right place at the right time. The issue with these satellites, other than they may not detect the problem, is that the data they produce must be relayed and processed on Earth.The hours required can't provide early warnings. Future generations of satellites, however, may overcome such limitations. There's always the chance we will grow to better understand the root cause of why tsunamis occur and circumvent rather than influence the cause. Otherwise, using satellites or any other technology strategy would simply be like putting a bandaid on a wound, or only dealing with the symptoms of real issues.

Against the odds

Are you the sort of person who asks, "when will they ever learn?" You may secretly wish you had the courage to take chances other people do, even if they don't always end up with their desired outcomes.  Maybe hearing about and even knowing some of these people is causing you to think it might be time to give up some of your fears and false beliefs.  After all, consider the barriers you have built up around them.  What do you prevent yourself from experiencing or achieving?

From the point you decided you desired more of certain things in life, you resolved to do what was required.  In your mind, you thought of reaching out to take what you could, but you didn't have the audacity.  Instead, you chose to follow set rules and systems, adopting the status quo.  You did what was expected, and you gradually moved up the ranks.  Perhaps you even lost your nerve to take chances.  What would it have mattered anyway, you think, unless it might've cost you your position or peer respect? You came to feel brute force was the way to separate winners and losers, yet, you've come to feel having what you've gained is missing something.

A voice inside is urging you to evolve away from that which you thought you were, in order to accept who you are.  You're realizing that protecting yourself from what you wish to experience is no longer the way to go.  You will stop justifying why you refuse to take that chance.  You're thinking it makes more sense to expend effort toward acting rather than listening to your doubt. 

It's time to ask yourself a few questions: is it possible some of your past choices weren't the ones you really desired to make? Is it possible that by taking a risk now to do things differently, that you would learn things about yourself that could change everything?  Is it possible that inviting yourself to step out of your comfort zone could be exhilarating, life-altering and transform you for the better? 

It's true some people appear content as they are.  Still other people refuse to accept a possibility of new ideas, and prefer not to try to understand them.   Each day, in everything you do, you live the results of your assessment and your choices.  By doing something or not doing something, you're responsible for the risks you consider and your reactions.  What would it take for you to alter some of your conditioned beliefs, to rethink your ways, and evolve new points of view?