I am indebted to John Taylor who contributed material for this
conversation.
I'm wondering:
if I were to live
my life
again, would I be swayed to do anything differently the second time?
And if so, what would it be? Yet even with that question posed, the
truth is
my life
has really been quite good. So what could be compelling enough to call
me to do something differently the second time?
Imagine you were to live your life again. You'd know more about
yourself, about life, about your life, about living, the
second time. You'd be much wiser the second time. And you'd have
transformation the second time (that's a really
interestingproposition:
you'd start your life with transformation / transformed
the second time). So what if anything, knowing what you know now, could
be compelling enough for you to do differently if you were to live it
over again?
To make this inquiry useful / to stay in focus, let's say you're only
allowed to make one change. So whatever you'd do
differently if you lived your life again, you're only allowed to change
one thing. What would that be? Choose carefully, wisely. Choose
globally. It's only one change. It'll impact everything you do.
I've looked at this
proposition
closely. It's a
no-brainer.
If I were to live
my life
once more, I'd live it without significance - that is I'd live
my life
once more except reading a lot less significance into things the second
time. That's what I would do differently. In hindsight (and hindsight
is always 20/20 vision), some things are simply not as
significant as I make them out to be. Really they aren't. In fact
nothing is as significant as we make it out to be. No
kidding!
Definition
significance
noun
importance, special meaning
<unquote>
Unwittingly we settle for significance in lieu of
direct experience.
Significance /
reasons
/ meaning prevail in our go-to ideas about the way things
are. In the context of
Conversations For Transformation,
inquiring into the origins of significance is arguably useful inasmuch
as it can be leveraged, so the inquiry becomes a
catalyst
for ideas which result in
direct experience.
In the absence of
direct experience,
things are significant / we imbue things with
reasons
and meaning simply because our minds are
meaning-making
machines
which assign meaning and significance anywhere and everywhere. The
process is built into the
machinery
and is thus
on full automatic.
So it's
futile
to attempt to stop, change, or detach from it - as various
disciplinarians
purport to be doing.
Interimly that's but one factor, unwitting or witting, in our making
things significant. Ultimately the more-than-likely cause of our making
things significant is that we don't know who we really are (which is
neither a bad thing nor a good thing - but it is a condition in which
being human
occurs). In the absence of knowing who we really are, we identify with
our minds (to the degree that we'll inevitably,
inexorablybecome our minds) rendering us as
meaning-making machines
who assign meaning and significance anywhere and everywhere. In this
scenario, the inmates have taken over the asylum, and they're running
it.
