When Things Align Quotes

When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.

I'm stupid," Leo mumbled. "Pi would expand outward, because it's infinite." He reversed the order of the numbers, starting in the center and working toward the edge. When he aligned the last ring, something inside the sphere clicked. The door swung open. Leo beamed at his friends. "That, good people, is how we do things in Leo World. Come on in!" "I hate Leo World," Frank muttered. Hazel laughed.

People experience anger when their expectations around how they should be treated don’t align with their actual treatment (or when they expect a thing to happen based on some series of actions and it does not happen).

People often seem to think that when you're following the Lord and trying to do His will, your path will always be clear, the decisions smooth and easy, and life will be lived happily ever after and all that. Sometimes that may be true, but I've found that more often, it's not. The muddled decisions still seem muddled, bad things still happen to believers, and great things can happen to nonbelievers. When it comes to making our decisions, the key that God is concerned with is that we are trusting and seeking Him. God's desire is for us to align our lives with His Word and His will.

When we align with the truth of who we are, all things are possible.

This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things.

Because people were people, and if there was one thing you could count on, it was that some of them would be weird. Or rather that all of them would be weird when circumstances happened to align with their own individual brand of insanity. That

You can't be stuck if you're not trying to get anywhere. Which, to me, means that when you stop fighting with the way things are, magic happens. You relax, open, and any action you take comes from alignment with what's true.

When you are in alignment with the desires of your heart, things have a way of working out.

God made no mistakes when He created you. You were uniquely designed for success in your purpose. When you align your life with your strengths—those innate qualities you were gifted with—you will tap into a level of grace that empowers you to achieve things you could never accomplish in your strength alone.

I soon came to know that when we align our will with the Lord's, nothing is impossible. I learned that through the enabling power of the atonement of our Savior, Jesus Christ, I could do things beyond my own natural ability.

Maybe this isn't the right thing to say, but I want you to know: When you ran for the stage, I've never been so proud of you in all my life. You've always been beautiful; you've always been talented. And now I know that your moral compass is perfectly aligned, that you see clearly when things are wrong, and you do everything you can to stop it. As a father, I can't ask for more. I love you America. And I'm so so proud.

Because people were people, and if there was one thing you could count on, it was that some of them would be weird. Or rather that all of them would be weird when circumstances happened to align with their own individual brand of insanity.

It’s good for good and spiritual people to have a lot of money. Because when good and spiritual people have a lot of money, we do good and spiritually aligned things with the money.

Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen.

Isn’t it funny how we make rational excuses for being out of alignment? We say, “Well, this ____ and that ____ happened, so it makes perfect sense for me to be feeling like this ____ and wanting to do this ____.” Yet, to this day, I have never met a happy person who adheres to those excuses. In fact, each time I – or anyone else – decide to give in to “rational excuses” that justify feeling bad – it’s interesting that only further suffering is the result. There is never a good enough reason for us to be out of alignment with peace. Sure, we can go there and make choices that dim our lights… and that is fine; there certainly is purpose for it and the contrast gives us lessons to learn… yet if we’re aware of what we are doing and we’re ready to let go of the suffering – then why go there at all? It’s like beating a dead horse. Been there, done that… so why do we keep repeating it? Pain is going to happen; it’s inevitable in this human experience, yet it is often so brief. When we make those excuses, what happens is: we pick up that pain and begin to carry it with us into the next day… and the next day… into next week… maybe next month… and some of us even carry it for years or to our graves! Forgive, let it go! It is NOT worth it! It is NEVER worth it. There is never a good enough reason for us to pick up that pain and carry it with us. There is never a good enough reason for us to be out of alignment with peace. Unforgiveness hurts you; it hurts others, so why even go there? Why even promote pain? Why say painful things to yourself or others? Why think pain? Just let it go! Whenever I look back on painful things or feel pain today, I know it is my EGO that drives me to “go there.” The EGO likes to have the last word, it likes to feel superior, it likes to make others feel less than in hopes that it will make itself (me) feel better about my insecurities. Maybe if I hurt them enough, they will feel the pain I felt over what they did to me. It’s only fair! It’s never my fault; it’s always someone else’s. There is a twisted sense of pleasure I get from feeling this way, and my EGO eats it right up. YET! With awareness that continues to grow and expand each day, I choose to not feed my pain (EGO) or even go there. I still feel it at times, of course, so I simply acknowledge it and then release it. I HAVE power and choice over my speech and actions. I do not need to ever “go there” again. It’s my choice; it’s your choice. So it’s about damn time we start realizing this. We are not victims of our impulses or emotions; we have the power to control them, and so it’s time to stop acting like we don’t. It’s time to relinquish the excuses.

He preferred leaving some things to the imagination, enjoying his own stories of what the clock had witnessed over the years. He could be a patient man when need be, and the fine, intricate parts definitely required a slow hand. An appreciative touch and respect for the inner workings that had to be aligned perfectly to function. He chuckled low. Definitely like

Doing the right thing is easy. After all, when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.

I wanted to get to a place where I only bought things I needed when I needed them. I wanted to finally see where my money was going and budget in a way that aligned with my goals and my values. And I really wanted to start spending less and saving more. But it would never happen if I continued to make mindless spending decisions.

Maybe this isn't the right thing to say, but I want you to know: when you ran for the stage, I've never been so proud of you in all my life. You've always been beautiful; you've always been talented. And now I know that your moral compass is perfectly aligned, that you see clearly when things are wrong, and you do everything you can to stop it.

He preferred leaving some things to the imagination, enjoying his own stories of what the clock had witnessed over the years. He could be a patient man when need be, and the fine, intricate parts definitely required a slow hand. An appreciative touch and respect for the inner workings that had to be aligned perfectly to function. He chuckled low. Definitely like a woman.

When two sides are accusing each other, it's very difficult to figure out the reality. Because reality is different for everyone. The difference is not just in mind. Things actually look different to different people. Two or more people can align or sync their realities if they trust each other. When trust is gone, their realities again become different. This is Samsara.

wisdom is accepting that there are things you cannot force: people change when they are ready creativity moves at its own rhythm healing does not have a time limit love blooms when things align

As long as we share our stories, as long as our stories reveal our strengths and vulnerabilities to each other, we reinvigorte our understanding and tolerance for the little quirks of personality that in other circumstances would drive us apart. When we live in a family, a community, a country where we know each other's true stories, we remember our capacity to lean in and love each other into wholeness. I have read the story of a tribe in southern Africa called the Babemba in which a person doing something wrong, something that destroys this delicate social net, brings all work in the village to a halt. The people gather around the "offender," and one by one they begin to recite everything he has done right in his life: every good deed, thoughtful behavior, act of social responsibility. These things have to be true about the person, and spoken honestly, but the time-honored consequence of misbehavior is to appreciate that person back into the better part of himself. The person is given the chance to remember who he is and why he is important to the life of the village. I want to live under such a practice of compassion. When I forget my place, when I lash out with some private wounding in a public way, I want to be remembered back into alignment with my self and my purpose. I want to live with the opportunity for reconciliation. When someone around me is thoughtless or cruel, I want to be given the chance to respond with a ritual that creates the possibility of reconnection. I want to live in a neighborhood where people don't shoot first, don't sue first, where people are Storycatchers willing to discover in strangers the mirror of themselves.

The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. … Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life. People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge. Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.

As I learned about the consequences of my food choices and as I recognized that I didn't have to eat animals, and that eating animals caused the animals to suffer, it caused an enormous footprint on our planet, and it wasn't healthy, it made since to go vegan. And, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I think most people who've decided to go vegan share a similar experience. It's very empowering. And, when I went vegan I actually started eating a wide variety of foods I had never tried before. Different ethnic foods. You also start combining things in different ways, you start becoming more creative in the kitchen. But I went vegan just because it seemed to make sense, and it was aligned with my own values, because I didn't want to support this system that was so abusive to animals, and wasting and squandering so many scarce resources on our planet. And it was also healthier, so it was in my interest to eat food that was plant-based instead of animal-based. Living a vegan lifestyle makes a lot of sense.

There is no biblical ground in the New Testament to align the Gospel message with a political party or ideology. Christians are rather taught in the Bible to be salt and light within their nations and societies, and to contend for biblical principles. The politically-related action outlined for Christians in the New Testament are chiefly limited to three essential things: praying for those in power, appealing to Caesar, and being good citizens as a witness and testimony while not bowing to man’s laws when they directly contradict God’s laws.

A business's purpose should be aligned with adding a certain kind of value: meeting certain kinds of needs, solving certain kinds of problems, and fulfilling certain kinds of desires. And when the business is doing those things, the business itself and everyone it feels a sense of fulfillment.

It’s about respecting yourself, instead of catering to your insecure need to be liked. This is incredibly powerful, because when you love yourself enough to stand in your truth no matter what the cost, everyone benefits. You start attracting the kinds of things, people, and opportunities, that are in alignment with who you truly are, which is way more fun than hanging out with a bunch of irritating energy suckers. And by declining to participate in other people’s drama, (i.e. refusing to rip people to shreds, to complain about how unfair the world is, etc.) you not only raise your own frequency, but you offer the drama queens the chance to rise up too, instead of everyone continuing to play a low, lame game.     Never apologize for who you are. It lets the whole world down.

This is incredibly powerful, because when you love yourself enough to stand in your truth no matter what the cost, everyone benefits. You start attracting the kinds of things, people, and opportunities, that are in alignment with who you truly are, which is way more fun than hanging out with a bunch of irritating energy suckers. And by declining to participate in other people’s drama, (i.e. refusing to rip people to shreds, to complain about how unfair the world is, etc.) you not only raise your own frequency, but you offer the drama queens the chance to rise up too, instead of everyone continuing to play a low, lame game.

And if you understand that emotions are a normal part of life, and that adults are allowed to feel the ups and downs and can survive it, you would be more courageous. It’s not your job to protect everybody else from feeling emotions. Your job and responsibility is to live your life in a way that is aligned with your values, and in a way that gets you. Sometimes that’s going to hurt someone. It’s going to disappoint them. It’s going to cause pain or heartbreak knowing that your decision will hurt someone else—and it’s going to be one of the hardest things you’re going to do in life. When I know my actions may disappoint or upset someone, I find it helpful to remember Dr. Damour’s framing that negative emotions are a mentally healthy response to life’s upsets. People are allowed to be upset when you change your mind, and disappointed or heartbroken when you break up. People are allowed to be depressed when they lose their job. So how do you do this, and how do you manage the excruciating level of guilt and discomfort YOU are going to feel when you make a hard decision that you know is the right decision for you?

Simple being is a deep sigh of relief that comes from letting go of pretense. It is also the sigh that comes from releasing a heavy burden that results from creating and managing the false selves that are substitute centers for the truth of our being. It is the sigh of release as we exchange complexity for simplicity. It is the sigh of release as we let go of preoccupations, inordinate attachments, and disordered passions. Things in the depths of our beings get aligned when we let go of these things.

When you're authentic, you also have integrity. You don't hesitate to do the right thing, so you never have to second-guess yourself. Who you are, what you do, and what you believe in – all of these align perfectly. Authenticity is living your life according to your own needs and values rather than those that society, friends, and family expect from you. Living authentically offers several benefits, including respect from others, the ability to realize your true potential, and happiness and well-being

And now I know that your moral compass is perfectly aligned, that you see clearly when things are wrong, and you do everything you can to stop it.

aligning all the edges perfectly. It’s what I do when I don’t know what to do. I tidy. I clean things up.

you don’t have to chase things when you are naturally in tune and aligned with them

More often than not, broken bonds are due to falling out of frequency with one another. When you cannot explain why you no longer talk or why things don’t feel the way they used to, it is because the frequency you are vibrating at no longer aligns with the frequency of that friendship. You are no longer a match for each other because your growth has taken you down a different path.

When you keep doing what you love and open yourself to unseen opportunities, that is when nature aligns itself to bring abundance of new things for your creation. Do what you love, and love what you do.

Contrast is not ‘bad’ since the contrast we experience still causes us to learn and grow. Expansion never ceases, and that is a beautiful thing. Contrast allows us to see what is not in alignment with our Authentic Selves, and then presents us with opportunity after opportunity to respond from a place of compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, love, joy, gratitude, etc. Thus, when we break the karmic loop we swing back into alignment with Spirit.

It’s the same feeling we get when we realize the summer is gone and now it is winter again and we didn’t go to the beach and the gym and camping and all the other things we promised ourselves we would do, any more often than we did the summer before. And now we have no choice—our birthday is here again whether we like it or not—so we gamely celebrate it, making the most of it, hiding our dread of mortality behind a cake and a card. Here is something amazing: When you fill every day with the best memories you can possibly make, when you visualize the life you want to live and then move toward it no matter what the cost, that twinge of regret is forever gone. You are aligned. You are exactly where you need to be. You can’t see the future, but that’s okay. You just take another step forward into the mystery, the unknown, knowing that your foot will always hit something. It is a wonderful thing to be free of the feeling of the marching of time; to have the ability to welcome it; to know that all your adventures, small and great, are creating you, a glorious you; to discover that when you love and celebrate your life, others will love and celebrate your life, too.

When people begin to experience the lull of mediocrity, they often question whether they are in the right job. They wonder if there might be another one out there that would better suit them, and that might give them the thrill they once experienced before things went south. They may even act on that impulse, hopping to another job or company, and subsequently find that everything is better for a while. The newness is back, and that craved-for sense of challenge has returned. Problem solved? Actually, no. In many of these situations the job hopper is right back in crisis within a matter of months. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with their new job; it’s because they changed their external situation without changing their mind-set and methods. They were trying to solve an internal problem by changing their external circumstances, which rarely works. You have to begin by finding alignment internally, then question your work environment.

When you are uncomfortable with the tasks you are ignoring in favor of the urgency of the moment, guilt, mental angst, and frustration build up.   To solve this, you need to make a conscious choice between the preplanned and the seemingly urgent at the moment.   Then, renegotiate any timeline agreements with yourself.     This simple and conscious mental alignment combined with the elevated perspective of the weekly review is enough to regain control and relax your mind in the face of daily surprises.

Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?

The most believable opinions are those of people who 1) have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question, and 2) have demonstrated that they can logically explain the cause-effect relationships behind their conclusions. When believability weighting is done correctly and consistently, it is the fairest and the most effective decision-making system. It not only produces the best outcomes but also preserves alignment, since even people who disagree with the decision will be able to get behind it.

How to Survive Racism in an Organization that Claims to be Antiracist: 10. Ask why they want you. Get as much clarity as possible on what the organization has read about you, what they understand about you, what they assume are your gifts and strengths. What does the organization hope you will bring to the table? Do those answers align with your reasons for wanting to be at the table? 9. Define your terms. You and the organization may have different definitions of words like "justice", "diveristy", or "antiracism". Ask for definitions, examples, or success stories to give you a better idea of how the organization understands and embodies these words. Also ask about who is in charge and who is held accountable for these efforts. Then ask yourself if you can work within the structure. 8. Hold the organization to the highest vision they committed to for as long as you can. Be ready to move if the leaders aren't prepared to pursue their own stated vision. 7. Find your people. If you are going to push back against the system or push leadership forward, it's wise not to do so alone. Build or join an antiracist cohort within the organization. 6. Have mentors and counselors on standby. Don't just choose a really good friend or a parent when seeking advice. It's important to have on or two mentors who can give advice based on their personal knowledge of the organization and its leaders. You want someone who can help you navigate the particular politics of your organization. 5. Practice self-care. Remember that you are a whole person, not a mule to carry the racial sins of the organization. Fall in love, take your children to the park, don't miss doctors' visits, read for pleasure, dance with abandon, have lots of good sex, be gentle with yourself. 4. Find donors who will contribute to the cause. Who's willing to keep the class funded, the diversity positions going, the social justice center operating? It's important for the organization to know the members of your cohort aren't the only ones who care. Demonstrate that there are stakeholders, congregations members, and donors who want to see real change. 3. Know your rights. There are some racist things that are just mean, but others are against the law. Know the difference, and keep records of it all. 2. Speak. Of course, context matters. You must be strategic about when, how, to whom, and about which situations you decide to call out. But speak. Find your voice and use it. 1. Remember: You are a creative being who is capable of making change. But it is not your responsibility to transform an entire organization.

Trust the message when things aren't meant to happen. Recognize that it's not always about timing or the perfect moment for things to align. If it doesn't fall into place, it could signify that you're not meant to connect with it, and it's not meant to be a part of your life.

God’s unmerited, divine assistance is enough. Period. It’s enough when things are going great and the stars are aligned, and it’s enough when God chooses to allow something dreadful to come across your path. It’s enough. It’s not easy, but it is what we need. And praise God for that.

It’s tough to change friends, and it’s even tougher to admit when a friendship has run its course, but it can be an important part of growth, too. Friends come and go and, when you change, oftentimes the things you have in common are no longer in alignment, especially if those things are of a time-wasting or unhealthy nature. We have a finite amount of time—the most valuable resource on this planet—and you have 100 percent control over how that time gets spent. Surround yourself with people who want you to be better, and you will see yourself start to level up faster than ever before.

Above all things, the Sun Priest must unite what is above to what is below. He must mirror the perfect order of the heavens to contain the disorder of the earth. Only when these are aligned can there be balance, and without balance, surely the world will tip into chaos. —The Manual of the Sun Priest

He came to believe that this was the very sort of thing that happened when you let yourself get caught in one culture's insistence that love ought to be like this or that. The key for people like him, he ultimately concluded, in this as in most matters, was to be nimble. Your privilege as an immigrant was to pick and choose your inheritance, maintain what suited you and participate merely to the extent of your patience and interest. It was not in your nature to align with one side fully, and so you couldn't help but make a life that was both apart and among. You didn't make one choice and stick with it but, rather, hundreds of minor choices with which you created a unique path through the corridors of old traditions and the avenues of the new. And you cultivated this dividedness because you carried always the imprint of that first move -- the decision to leave home. Indeed, this initiating choice, more than anything, was your true inheritance.

You can get a running start on a day of aligned Energy as you put yourself to bed the night before: Find things in your immediate vicinity—such as your bed, your bed linens, and your pillow—to direct your appreciation toward. Then set your intention to sleep well and to awaken refreshed. When you find yourself awake in the morning, lie in more appreciation for at least five minutes, and then refresh yourself by bathing and eating. Then, sit for 15 minutes and quiet your mind. Feel whatever resistance you may have fall away, and feel your Vibration rise. Then open your eyes, and sit for five or ten minutes writing a list of things you appreciate about your life.

As actor and comedian Lily Tomlin once said, “The road to success is always under construction.” So don’t allow yourself to be detoured from getting to your ONE Thing. Pave your way with the right people and place. BIG IDEAS Start saying “no.” Always remember that when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to everything else. It’s the essence of keeping a commitment. Start turning down other requests outright or saying, “No, for now” to distractions so that nothing detracts you from getting to your top priority. Learning to say no can and will liberate you. It’s how you’ll find the time for your ONE Thing. Accept chaos. Recognize that pursuing your ONE Thing moves other things to the back burner. Loose ends can feel like snares, creating tangles in your path. This kind of chaos is unavoidable. Make peace with it. Learn to deal with it. The success you have accomplishing your ONE Thing will continually prove you made the right decision. Manage your energy. Don’t sacrifice your health by trying to take on too much. Your body is an amazing machine, but it doesn’t come with a warranty, you can’t trade it in, and repairs can be costly. It’s important to manage your energy so you can do what you must do, achieve what you want to achieve, and live the life you want to live. Take ownership of your environment. Make sure that the people around you and your physical surroundings support your goals. The right people in your life and the right physical environment on your daily path will support your efforts to get to your ONE Thing. When both are in alignment with your ONE Thing, they will supply the optimism and physical lift you need to make your ONE Thing happen. Screenwriter Leo Rosten pulled everything together for us when he said, “I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.” Live with Purpose, Live by Priority, and Live for Productivity. Follow these three for the same reason you make the three commitments and avoid the four thieves—because you want to leave your mark. You want your life to matter. 18

Cole blinks like he's looked into the sun for too long. "Mostly fine". This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don't know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people's feelings. They don't know what to do when they've heard something that does not align with their own perception of things.

We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts.34 You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. Like the moviegoer who later finds out what she missed in the first half hour, your life will suddenly make more sense. Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment,35 and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.

When circumstances are right, unlikely people do extraordinary things. When the weight of the world is behind them, the push of events and time itself will align to make incredible things happen. Look around you, Brashen. You skirt the center of the vortex, so close you do not see how wondrous are the circumstances surrounding us. We are being swept toward a climax in time, a critcal choice-point where all the future must go one way, or another. "Liveships are wakening to their true pasts. Serpents, reputed to be myths when you where a boy, are now accepted as natural. The serpents speak, Brashen, to Paragon, and Paragon speaks to us. When last did humanity concede intelligence to another race of creatures? What will it mean to your children and your grandchildren? You are caught up in a grand sweep of events, culminating in the changing of the course of the world." She lowered her voice and a smile touched her mouth. "Yet all you can perceive is that you are separated from Althea. A man's loss of his mate may be the essential trigger that determines all events from henceforth. Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?

MAYBE THIS ISN’T THE RIGHT THING TO SAY, BUT I WANT YOU TO KNOW: WHEN YOU RAN FOR THE STAGE, I’VE NEVER BEEN SO PROUD OF YOU IN ALL MY LIFE. YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN BEAUTIFUL; YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN TALENTED. AND NOW I KNOW THAT YOUR MORAL COMPASS IS PERFECTLY ALIGNED, THAT YOU SEE CLEARLY WHEN THINGS ARE WRONG, AND YOU DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO STOP IT. AS A FATHER, I CAN’T ASK FOR MORE. I LOVE YOU, AMERICA. AND

~ The stark truth is that you'll inevitably outgrow your surroundings, including friends and loved ones. Eventually, you'll realize that familiar things have changed. There will come a time when you'll notice that things are no longer the same. You cannot preserve every aspect of your past, and not everyone will align with your current path. Embrace this reality and keep moving forward without dwelling on the past.

The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow. To know one big thing or many little ones is, therefore, not enough: resemblances, which Thucydides insists must happen, can occur anywhere along the spectrum from hedgehogs to foxes and back again. So is he one or the other? It’s as useless to ask as it would be, of an accomplished athlete, to try to say. Thucydides’ “first-rate intelligence” accommodates opposing ideas so effortlessly that he entrusts us with hundreds in his history. He does so within time and space but also across scale: only Tolstoy rivals him, I think, in sensing significance where it seems not to be. It’s no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, “may have believed things we have either forgotten or never known; and we must keep open the possibility that in some respects, at least, they were wiser than we.” 10

You know what you are? All of you? Children. Little kids playing pretend, with toys. You've spent years obsessing about this and now it's here, much to everyone's surprise, it's actually here, and it's  'tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.' Tomorrow, when the sun comes up. Tomorrow, when the weather is warmer. Tomorrow, when we have more help, when things aren't so bad, when everything is aligned just right so that there's no risk of anything bad possibly happening.

Once you know your WHY, you have a choice to live it every day. Living it means consistently taking actions that are in alignment with the things you say. If you say one thing and do another too frequently, you will lose the trust of others. Our actions either add to or take away from the trust and loyalty others feel toward us. When the things we say and the things we do are aligned with what we believe, we are fully living our WHY. Will you choose to take a stand?

You should buy property when there’s ‘blood in the streets’ – in other words when things become unstable, the value drops, and it’s a good time to buy because everyone is trying to sell. Eventually prices go back up when everything settles. When I got into real estate, there were plenty of properties for sale that were really cheap – and this was because the market had been unstable before – with the previous S&L crisis. I was lucky enough to get into it at the perfect time.

Love and appreciation are identical vibrations. Appreciation is the vibration of alignment with who-you-are. Appreciation is the absence of everything that feels bad and the presence of everything that feels good. When you focus upon what you want – when you tell the story of how you want your life to be – you will come closer and closer to the vicinity of appreciation, and when you reach it, it will pull you toward all things that you consider to be good in a very powerful way.

You may be broken now, and things look rather bleak. I know. You may not believe me when I say you can heal because your heart is breaking in a way it never has. It’s like every broken heart you’ve ever had has come together to magnify the brokenness. It seems everything has fallen apart, but soon it will all come together again, I promise you—the way it was supposed to be. Deep down, we have the answers. When we are ready, we’ll align our will with the will of our highest power of love and light. I’m here with you.

A place for the newly weds and nearly deads I'm counting the stones I hope you know I love you. Got a lot of friends 6 feet under us. Counting down the days till we join the party. Thoughts of your nightmare projected through mine... Breathing in these lies is no surprise These evil things are all we know Lets take these lives where we want to go. The future is our prize, when the stars align. Ghouls and ghosts will haunt my soul but they will never take me. Before I go, I want to show that we can make a difference. We've got some dumb perceptions. But I've got the death connection... All the hate that you have... Just throw it away Life is meant for more, But we're too distracted.. Too caught up in the anger and judgment.. Caught up in the web of lies I've heard these things keep our blood boiling, Keeps us alive, and moving forward... If that's the case I was born a dead man. And I'm forever a ghost. Hatred is something that we're brought up to see. Now everybody's looking at me I hope they know... They won't get their satisfaction.

And he was right. Because Carlos De Vil’s brain, by way of comparison, was almost as big as Cruella De Vil’s fur-coat closet. That’s what Carlos tried to tell himself, anyway, especially when people were making him run the tombs. His first class today was Weird Science, one he always looked forward to. It was where he’d originally gotten the idea to put his machine together, from the lesson on radio waves. Carlos was not the only top student in the class—he was tied, in fact, with the closest thing he had to a rival in the whole school: the scrawny, bespectacled Reza. Reza was the son of the former Royal Astronomer of Agrabah, who had consulted with Jafar to make sure the stars aligned on more than one nefarious occasion, which was how his family had found their way to the Isle of the Lost with everyone else. Weird Science was the class where Carlos always worked the hardest. The presence of Reza, who was every bit as competitive in science lab as he was, only made Carlos work that much harder. And as annoying as everyone found Reza to be—he always had to use the very biggest words for everything, whether they were used correctly and whether he was inserting a few extra syllables where they might or might not belong—he was still smart. Very smart. Which meant Carlos enjoyed besting him. Just the other week they had been working on a special elixir, and Reza had been annoyed that Carlos had figured out the secret ingredient first. Yeah, Reza was almost as smart as he was irritating. Even now he was raising his hand, waving it wildly back and forth. Their professor, the powerful sorcerer Yen Sid,

neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rates. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level. Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness—dubbed “collective effervescence” by French sociologist Émile Durkheim—which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community.

When people encounter the true God, they experience a selfquake. That’s one way you can tell if you’ve met Israel’s God or simply a figment of your imagination. A made-up God will leave your world undisturbed, conveniently aligning with your priorities without displacing anything, because ultimately you are more glorious than it is. The real God, however, will land in the middle of your life like an elephant crashing through the ceiling, displacing your sin, changing all your priorities, and forcing you to reorient yourself around the weight of glory.

Let the tasks for the day announce themselves for your contemplation. Maybe you can do this in the morning, as you sit on the edge of your bed. Maybe you can try, the night before, when you are preparing to sleep. Ask yourself for a voluntary contribution. If you ask nicely, and listen carefully, and don’t try any treachery, you might be offered one. Do this every day, for a while. Then do it for the rest of your life. Soon you will find yourself in a different situation. Now you will be asking yourself, habitually, “What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?” You are not dictating to yourself what “better” must be. You are not being a totalitarian, or a utopian, even to yourself, because you have learned from the Nazis and the Soviets and the Maoists and from your own experience that being a totalitarian is a bad thing. Aim high. Set your sights on the betterment of Being. Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.

When you have lived an experience that helps you understand, in an exaggerated way, the very thing you do not want, you also understand, in an exaggerated way, what you do want. But when you are painfully aware of what you do not want, you are not in alignment with what you do want. When you desire something that you do not believe is possible, you are not in alignment. When there is something that you want and you are feeling unhappy that you do not have it, you are not in alignment; when you see someone who currently has the very thing that you desire and you feel jealous, you are not in alignment.

Every time you choose to do the easy thing (anything that is out of alignment with your values or with achieving your goals), instead of the right thing (anything that is in alignment with your values and will move you closer to your goals), you are shaping your identity into someone who does what’s easy instead of what’s right. On the other hand, when you choose to follow through with your commitments—especially when you don’t feel like it—you are developing the extraordinary discipline necessary for creating extraordinary results in your life (which, unfortunately, most people never choose to develop).

billionaire Jeff Hoffman recently spoke at one of the Quantum Leap Mastermind retreats that my business partner, Jon Berghoff, and I cohost, and of the many takeaways that I wrote down, the following stood out most: “You can’t win a gold medal at more than one [sport].” Let that sink in for a minute. Most Olympic athletes spend their entire lives focused on developing themselves to be best in the world at one thing. And remember what we learned in the last chapter, that when you choose and commit to one mission, achieving your other goals will become more probable, because you will be living in alignment with your highest priority.

You are the value. In life, you will have moments when you wonder if you’re good enough for a job, another person, or something else that you really want. When you appraise the importance of your desire as being more valuable than yourself, then you are creating an imbalance in your self-perception. You place the significance on the thing that is outside of yourself as opposed to who you are within yourself. This takes away your power and gives it to an external force. The true question is whether the job, relationship, or thing is good enough for you. Does it align with the vision you have for yourself and your life? Is it worthy of your time and energy? Will it better you? Will it fulfill you? Does it deserve you?

The next thing you do is center yourself, get to that Effortless Action place, and then you present yourself in the middle of the environment you want to Create a Cause in, from a perfectly centered position. And then you place your Intention on the desired Result. As soon as you do that, "accidents" begin to happen. Jung calls them "synchronicities". Be prepared for those accidents to happen. You know they're going to happen. You don't know when or what they're going to be. Every one is a surprise. But every time an accident occurs in a situation, you pick it up and say Thank you to Mother Nature for creating this accident. And place it on the focus of your Intention. The causation thus begins, and your idea begins to become manifested. You're building a bridge, you're building a house, you're building a relationship with your girl friend or boy friend. You're bombarded with chaos and accidents, but every time something happens that aligns with your intention, thank the universe for it, position it, stroke it, mould it, "kiss it", as Blake would say. And go back to the beginning. I'm drawing a closed loop to fulfil your intention. Correct things to be sure that the results you're getting are what you really want. Get centered again. Be alert for more "accidents". And Mother Nature will produce what you desire. And She'll thank you for it. Mother Nature is a living principle that is dedicated to your well being, but you've got to ask before She can do it. So She's sitting there begging for you to try some tricks.

People who haven’t found their sacred cause just drift from one thing to another. They may be consumed by a sudden passion and enthusiasm for something, believing they have at last found their sacred cause, but the feeling doesn’t last, and soon they move on to the next thing. Some people of this kind simply never find their sacred cause and end up as the ultimate cynics, skeptics, nihilists and atheists. They are totally embittered and negative, and frequently heavy users of alcohol and drugs to numb their pain. Nothing is more important than finding your sacred cause. You are lost without it. When you have assumed a sacred cause, you at last feel aligned with your soul itself. You feel real, valid, authentic, true and right, no longer fake, phoney, fraudulent, false and wrong.

If you’re still struggling to recognize your Something Larger, research has found a few strategies that can help: Try writing your own obituary or a “life summary” through the eyes of a grandchild or a student. Ask your closest friends to describe the “real you,” the characteristics of your personality and your life that are at the core of your best self. Imagine that someone you care about is going through a dark moment in their life—they’ve experienced significant loss and feel helpless and isolated (the two things that drain us of meaning fastest). As your best self, write that person a letter to support them through this difficult time. Then reread it. It’s for you.18 Finally, think of a time when you experienced an intense sense of meaning or purpose or “alignment” or whatever it feels like for you. What were you doing? What was it that created that sense of meaning?

HEALTHY BOUNDARIES Minimalism helps you set healthy boundaries by giving you the clarity to see all the things you’re spinning your wheels on. Resetting boundaries to align with priorities is an ongoing process in a minimalist lifestyle, but it’s not an unwelcome chore. The rewards of more being and less striving encourage me to keep going on this journey. If I don’t prioritize my life, someone or something else will. MORE TIME Keeping more than we need, whether it’s possessions or activities, brings a fog into our daily lives that makes it harder to think clearly. Under the influence of clutter, we may underestimate how much time we’re giving to the less important stuff. When we say, “If I could find the time . . .” we’re really talking about how we choose to use our time. Minimalism helps you see how you’re spending your time and to think more clearly about how you would really like to spend it.

Nothing is isolated. Do one thing, however small, and it will affect something else on the other side of the world" "But the surest way to slow your own progress is to rush yourself into situations you’re not yet ready for.”" "When you’re pushed to extreme fear or anger, your body magnifies your energy tenfold, sometimes a hundredfold. It isn’t like this for everyone" “I was wrong. Passion is bright and warm . . . but passion has a dark side too. It links with fear. Our hearts fill with terror at the thought of harm coming to our loved ones, don’t they? You cannot have love without fear. The two coexist. In you, your alignment with passion instead fed your fear and fury. It made you darker. The more you love someone, the more unsteady your powers become. Your growing passion for Enzo made you volatile. It led to you losing control over your powers, powers that had grown to dangerous strengths. That, coupled with your anger and bitterness, has made you incredibly unpredictable.

Benefit #10 - Willingness to Let Things Go We tend to hold onto things that have caused us emotional pain. Examples include mistakes that carried terrible consequences, perceived slights from others, and regrettable decisions from our distant past. These things can sometimes begin to define us. They become a part of our identity. When they become so, they rob us of the inner peace and confidence we would otherwise experience. When you develop mental toughness, you’ll become more inclined to let such things go. Rather than dwelling on past pains and regrets, you’ll see them as stepping stones to your continual growth. Every mistake become a lesson from which to acquire insight. Every perceived slight becomes an opportunity to nurture valued relationships. Every regrettable decision becomes a chance to reexamine your intentions and ensure they align with your values. Ultimately, after these things have served their purpose, you’ll be able to move on, leaving them where they belong: in the past.

(It’s a doozy! I could listen to it all day long.) Nikki Lane—“Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Coming Home to You” Patterson Hood—“Belvedere,” “Back of a Bible” Ryan Bingham—“Guess Who’s Knocking” American Aquarium—“Casualties” Devil Doll—“The Things You Make Me Do” American Aquarium—“I’m Not Going to the Bar” Hank Williams Jr.—“Family Tradition” David Allan Coe—“Mama Tried” John Paul Keith—“She’ll Dance to Anything” Carl Perkins—“Honey, Don’t” Scott H. Biram—“Lost Case of Being Found” The Cramps—“The Way I Walk” The Reverend Horton Heat—“Jimbo Song” Justin Townes Earle—“Baby’s Got a Bad Idea” Old Crow Medicine Show—“Wagon Wheel,” “Hard to Love” Dirty River Boys—“My Son” JD McPherson—“Wolf Teeth” Empress of Fur—“Mad Mad Bad Bad Mama” Dwight Yoakam—“Little Sister” The Meteors—“Psycho for Your Love” Hayes Carll—“Love Don’t Let Me Down” HorrorPops—“Dotted with Hearts” Buddy Holly—“Because I Love You” Chris Isaak—“Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” Jason Isbell—“The Devil Is My Running Mate” Lindi Ortega—“When All the Stars Align” Three Bad Jacks—“Scars” Kasey Anderson and the Honkies—“My Blues, My Love

Autopilot is the enemy of boldness, because autopilot equals tunnel vision. When you operate on autopilot, you reflexively do the same things, over and over, because you haven’t paused long enough to consider a more conscious choice. On autopilot, you can access just a narrow slice of the possibilities around you. In fact, the aperture is so narrow that you become literally blind to the options. You’re being carried by habit, by momentum, rather than going where you intentionally point your headlights. Hell, on autopilot, you don’t even need to check whether you even have headlights, because you’re not actually driving. You’re just drifting. But when you get more intentional about the choices you make—no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential—the lens through which you view those choices begins to open up. The realm of what is possible widens and you can see just how many more chances life offers to align to your preferences and values, through your discernment, to your deeper being. Change starts with acknowledging the life you’re living doesn’t line up with the life you want. From there, it’s about getting off autopilot. Then you can make decisions that honor and support that most holy part within you.

On October 2, 1982, Lisa Toscano and I entered a marriage covenant, and she became Lisa Bevere. On that very day she took the position of my wife. She’s not more my wife today than the day I married her, nor will she be more my wife forty years from now. Positionally, she fully became my wife on that wedding day; the work was complete. Similarly, in Christ we were made holy and clean on the day of our salvation, and we will never be more holy. However, once Lisa became my wife, her behavior began to align with her position. Before she was my wife, she dated other guys, gave them her phone number, lived for her own desires, and all the other things single women do, but now she didn’t do these things any longer. Her actions aligned with the covenant we made together. This behavior has grown more mature in aligning with our covenant the longer we’ve been married. Listen to what the apostle Peter writes: [Live] as children of obedience [to God]; do not conform yourselves to the evil desires [that governed you] in your former ignorance [when you did not know the requirements of the Gospel]. But as the One Who called you is holy, you yourselves also be holy in all your conduct and manner of living. For it is written, You shall be holy, for I am holy. (1 Peter 1:14–16 AMPC)

Consider yourself very lucky when an opportunity happens at a moment you are no longer willing to let opportunities slip. When you've dropped all of your fears and inhibitions, when you are developed in a skill set to match the requirements, when you're no longer questioning your worth and are firm with your boundaries, and have clear and expanded perception of yourself and life, When you're growth-oriented so that, your confidence does not come from having all of the answers. Consider yourself very lucky, to face opportunities from that level of maturity. Because then, the opportunity will be in a different kind of resonance with you, too. Dare to manifest, and then some. What good is the manifestation, if it turns out to be a dead end? For example, you want to manifest a perfect partner, but then when you meet them, don't know how to actually be in a stable, committed and thriving relationship. Things manifested will propel you forward only if you're able to see yourself through. Things manifested are a thing of gratitude, but also the only way to truly appreciate them is to acknowledge them, align with them, and make most of the circumstances. Get yourself in a place where you no longer repel your blessings. That's what work is mostly about. Heal so you can thrive.

The truth is, you can do all of the right things and still not feel whole. For the most part, I knew "how to do grief" after my pregnancy loss, but when I'd check in with myself, I didn't feel like it was helping. I felt like a big fucking mess. I was still challenged to live my daily life, my grief blanketed everything, and I didn't know what to do. My new loss challenged my assumptions of what I knew about loss. I thought that I could rely on the muscle memory of grief to get me through this loss. Many people will say, "I've already been through the worst," or "I've been here before," but that's not how grief or healing works. You can't create a program around your pain or healing. Each new loss has a rhythym of its own. There are different waves and challenges for every occurrence in your life where you experience grief - whether it's through death or some other kind of loss, a breakup or friendship ending, losing a job. Any kind of loss introduces a new set of feelings and new requirements for your healing. Every new loss also has something to teach us, whether we like it or not. My pregnancy loss taught me that effort does not always align with outcome. I poured everything I had into getting pregnant - I literally let someone electrocute my fucking uterus - and it just didn't work.

Dear Circle of Life, The impression of you is so unique in the most exquisite ways. With you, there is a beginning and an end. You are the representation of birth and life. The in-between is survival, and the ending is death. The idea of life is just what it is when we arrive on the earth—our life is a circle, if you will, a 360. Once our wheels stop spinning, it rolls slowly until it completely stops. I believe there is a limitation to the circle of life—if there wasn’t, life would continue without end. Things are never certain, for there are always uncertain changes in the circle of life. In this universal symbol, there is repurpose in another life. You are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. How can that be? I guess because you are energetic. We are wholeness in another world, but here on earth, we are here to play the game from the cards that we are dealt until our time runs out. A world without end—that is interesting. I guess it is true because when we go to a new dimension, there is no such thing as an ending. Once we pass over, we originate into our infinite perfection. The self sees and feels no more back- biting, hurt, pain, depression, despair, and all the bullshit that follows. The circle of life has no blame, solitude, or default. Everything is what it is ... because it is perfect! I am aligned with the frequency and vibration of the moon and the stars.

The big question that usually comes up at this point of our discussion is, “Abraham, how do I know that what comes forth from within me may be trusted? Isn’t there someone greater than I who makes all of the rules and wants me to be or do specific things?” And we say, you are the creator of your experience, and you have emerged forth into this physical body through the power of your desire. You are not here to prove yourself worthy of something else; you are not here because you seek greater salvation on some other plane. You are here because you have a specific purpose in being here. You want to be a Deliberate Creator, and you have chosen this physical dimension, where there is time and space, so that you may finely tune your understanding and then see the benefits of whatever you have created in thought by allowing it to come into your physical experience. You are adding to the expansion of the Universe, and All-That-Is benefits from your existence, by your exposure to this experience and by your expansion. All that you do pleases that which you seek to please. There is not a list of things that are right and a list of things that are wrong—there is only that which aligns with your true intent and purpose, and that which does not. You may trust your Guidance that comes forth from within you to help you know when you are in alignment with your state of natural Well-Being.

Cellular biologist Glen Rein, Ph.D., conceived of a series of experiments to test healers’ ability to affect biological systems. [...] In Dr. Rein’s experiment, he first studied a group of ten individuals who were well practiced in using techniques that Heart-Math teaches to build heart-focused coherence. They applied the techniques to produce strong, elevated feelings such as love and appreciation, then for two minutes, they held vials containing DNA samples suspended in deionized water. When those samples were analyzed, no statistically significant changes had occurred. A second group of trained participants did the same thing, but instead of just creating positive emotions (a feeling) of love and appreciation, they simultaneously held an intention (a thought) to either wind or unwind the strands of DNA. This group produced statistically significant changes in the conformation (shape) of the DNA samples. In some cases the DNA was wound or unwound as much as 25 percent! A third group of trained subjects held a clear intent to change the DNA, but they were instructed not to enter into a positive emotional state. In other words, they were only using thought (intention) to affect matter. The result? No changes to the DNA samples. [...] Only when subjects held both heightened emotions and clear objectives in alignment were they able to produce the intended effect. An intentional thought needs an energizer, a catalyst—and that energy is an elevated emotion.

crucial that we acknowledge two cardinal truths. First, whining and complaining about unfavorable conditions does nothing to resolve them. Second, it can too easily introduce a host of negative emotions that result in further despair and disappointment. Maintaining a positive mindset is pivotal to facing adversity with courage. Each morning, reflect on things that have gone right for you. Each afternoon, think about everything you have for which to be thankful. Each evening, before you go to bed, contemplate the small victories you enjoyed throughout the day. Practice gratitude daily. Habit #5: Build a tolerance for change. Mental toughness requires that you be flexible to your circumstances. When things go wrong, you must be able to adapt in order to act with purpose. Most of us dread change. We enjoy predictability because it reduces uncertainty. Fear of uncertainty is one of the chief impediments to taking purposeful action. Building this habit entails leaving your comfort zone. It calls for actively seeking changes that you can incorporate into your life. The upside is that doing so will desensitize you to changing circumstances, increasing your tolerance for them. As your tolerance increases, your fear will naturally erode. The great thing about habit development is that you can advance at your own pace. Again, it’s best to start with small steps and progress slowly. But each of us is different with regard to what “small” and “slowly” mean. Design a plan that aligns with your existing routines and caters to your available time, attention, and energy. EXERCISE #6 Write down three habits you’d like to develop. Next to each one, write down

Yet just eighty years ago it still seemed an impossible mission when U.S. President Herbert Hoover was tasked with beating back the Great Depression with only a mixed bag of numbers, ranging from share values to the price of iron to the volume of road transport. Even his most important metric – the “blast-furnace index” – was little more than an unwieldy construct that attempted to pin down production levels in the steel industry. If you had asked Hoover how “the economy” was doing, he would have given you a puzzled look. Not only because this wasn’t among the numbers in his bag, but because he would have had no notion of our modern understanding of the word “economy.” “Economy” isn’t really a thing, after all – it’s an idea, and that idea had yet to be invented. In 1931, Congress called together the country’s leading statisticians and found them unable to answer even the most basic questions about the state of the nation. That something was fundamentally wrong seemed evident, but their last reliable figures dated from 1929. It was obvious that the homeless population was growing and that companies were going bankrupt left and right, but as to the actual extent of the problem, nobody knew. A few months earlier, President Hoover had dispatched a number of Commerce Department employees around the country to report on the situation. They returned with mainly anecdotal evidence that aligned with Hoover’s own belief that economic recovery was just around the bend. Congress wasn’t reassured, however. In 1932, it appointed a brilliant young Russian professor by the name of Simon Kuznets to answer a simple question: How much stuff can we make? Over the next few years, Kuznets laid the foundations of what would later become the GDP. His

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

If you believe that you must work hard in order to deserve the money that comes to you, then money cannot come to you unless you do work hard. Financial success, or any other kind of success, does not require hard work. It does require alignment of thought. You simply cannot offer negative thought about things that you desire and then make up for it with action or hard work. When you learn to direct your own thoughts, you will discover the true leverage of Energy alignment.

The messianic Son had finally been born, but the setting of the birth gives Luke’s readers the first real hint that this King may not fit everyone’s expectations. We will come back to this issue of expectations later, but for now it is worth reflecting on our expectations of God, his character, and his actions. Wrong expectations are a key source of disillusionment and disappointment. A cynical person might argue that we should never expect anything from anyone in order to avoid being let down. Such an approach to people and God, however, will surely lead to a bitter and lonely life. We need each other, and we need God. What happens, then, when God fails to meet our expectations or to act in the way that we thought, hoped, and prayed that he would? In such instances, we need to reevaluate our expectations to make sure they align with the promises of God. God has not promised us that we will be free from all sickness and have lots of money in this lifetime. He has not promised that bad things will not happen to good people. He has not promised that we and our loved ones will never die. In this present age life is fatal; no one gets out alive. He has promised that he will be with us no matter what and that nothing can ever separate us from his love.34 He has promised that resurrection will triumph over death and that there will be a future day when he will personally wipe every tear from every eye and remove sickness and death from his creation forever.35 We will not always understand why things happen, but we can trust that God will fulfill his promises. He is faithful.36

Most of us have to make some trade-offs and compromises along the way, including some we may not like. If your Lifeview is that art is the only thing worth pursuing, and your Workview tells you that it’s critical to make enough money so your kids have everything they need, you are going to make a compromise in your Lifeview while your children are dependent and at home. But that will be okay, because it’s a conscious decision, which allows you to stay “on course” and coherent. Living coherently doesn’t mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It simply means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way. When you have a good compass guiding you, you have the power to cut these kinds of deals with yourself. If you can see the connections between who you are, what you believe, and what you are doing, you will know when you are on course, when there is tension, when there might need to be some careful compromises, and when you are in need of a major course correction. Our experience with our students has shown that the ability to connect these three dots increases your sense of self, and that helps you create more meaning in your life and have greater satisfaction.

What’s most important, contrary to what the prevailing cultural word may be, is not bringing the desires of your heart to bear on the world, but letting the real-life needs of others shape your heart. In seeking God’s will for us vocationally, we look for where our developing aspirations match up with our developing abilities to meet the actual needs of others. Over time, we seek to cultivate a kind of dialogue (with ourselves and with others) between what we desire to do and what we find ourselves good at doing for the benefit of others. Delight in certain kinds of labor typically grows as others affirm our efforts, and we see them receiving genuine help. You may feel called, and others may affirm your abilities, but you are not yet fully called until God opens a door. Here we glory in the truth of God’s providence, not just hypothetically but tangibly. The real world in which we live, and various options as they are presented to us, are not random or coincidental. God rules over all things — from him, through him, to him (Romans 11:36). And so as real-life options (job offers) are presented that fulfill an aspiration in us, and are confirmed by the company of others, we can take these as confirmation of God’s “calling.” Not that such a calling will never change. But for now, when your own personal sense of God’s leading, and good perspective and guidance from others, align with a real-world opportunity in the form of an actual job offer in front of you, you have a calling from God. And we can say this calling is from him because God himself, in his hand of providence, has done the decisive work. He started the process by planting in us righteous desires to help others; and he affirmed the direction through our lived-out abilities and the affirmation of friends. Now, he confirms that sense of calling by swinging open the right door at the right time. It is finally God, not man who provides the job offer. He gives you to the world in the service of others.

When you start doing things that are truly in alignment with what your true self wants, what your soul wants, you flourish and life becomes a lot easier.

When circumstances are right, unlikely people do extraordinary things. When the weight of the world is behind them, the push of events and time itself will align to make incredible things happen.

Incidentally, there's a little historical footnote here, if you're interested. The oil company that was authorized by the Treasury Department under Bush and Clinton to ship oil to the Haitian coup leaders happened to be Texaco. And people of about my age who were attuned to these sorts of things might remember back to the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration was trying to undermine the Spanish Republic at the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936 and '37―you'll remember that Texaco also played a role. See, the Western powers were strongly opposed to the Spanish Republican forces at that point during the Spanish Civil War―because the Republican side was aligned with a popular revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist revolution that was breaking out in Spain, and there was a danger that that revolution might take root and spread to other countries. After the anarcho-syndicalist organizations were put down by force, the Western powers didn't care so much anymore [anarcho-syndicalism is a sort of non-Leninist or libertarian socialism]. But while the revolution was still going on in Spain and the Republican forces were at war with General Franco and his Fascist army―who were being actively supported by Hitler and Mussolini, remember―the Western countries and Stalinist Russia all wanted to see the Republican forces just gotten rid of. And one of the ways in which the Roosevelt administration helped to see that they were gotten rid of was through what was called the "Neutrality Act"―you know, we're going to be neutral, we're not going to send any support to either the Republican side or the Fascist side, we're just going to let them fight their own war. Except the "Neutrality Act" was only 50 percent applied in this case. You see, the Fascists were getting all the guns they needed from Germany, but they didn't have enough oil. So therefore the Texaco Oil Company―which happened to be run by an outright Nazi at the time [Captain Thorkild Rieber], something that wasn't so unusual in those days, actually―simply terminated its existing oil contracts with the Spanish Republic and redirected its tankers in mid-ocean to start sending the Fascists the oil they needed, in July 1936. It was all totally illegal, of course, but the Roosevelt administration never pushed the issue. And again, the entire American press at the time was never able to discover it―except the small left-wing press: somehow they were able to find out about it. So if you read the small left-wing press in the United States back in 1937, they were reporting this all the time, but the big American newspapers just have never had the resources to find out about things like this, so they never said a word. I mean, years later people writing diplomatic history sort of mention these facts in the margins―but at the time there was nothing in the mainstream.

I wanted to fix things, obviously. You know it’s like… the planets are out of alignment when we’re fighting.

We don’t start our lives in a state of independence and then face the challenge of creating some sort of relationship or bond with others. But when we are supposed to argue for the importance of a society we almost always start here: with an autonomous individual, and then we enumerate the reasons why he should create dependencies and relationships. – It’ll be easier to produce food. – It’ll be easier to defend ourselves against wild animals. – It will make him happier. – He can get help when he is sick. – He will live longer. There are many advantages to having other people around. As if we had ever had any other choice. The process is actually the opposite. We are born into other people’s demands and expectations. To be a child is to be almost completely dependent on others. We have never known anything else. Totally at the mercy of their hopes, demands, love, neuroses, traumas, disappointments and unrealized lives. To take care of a child is in a way to constantly be meeting the needs of another, and from this intimacy, the child must learn, step by step, to become more independent. As the feminist theorist Virginia Held has pointed out: the natural human state is to be enveloped by our dependency on others. The challenge is to break out of this and find one’s own identity. Carve out more and more space for one’s self. From within a context of other people, relationships and the world they bring, you set out to find what’s you. Those who take care of the child must themselves be able to support a separate identity. Not be swallowed by constant engagement or to be enticed into finding all of their value by being so completely needed by someone else. Managing to do this and to keep the relationships of mutual dependency healthy is the challenge that shapes most lives and societies. Every day and every hour. So many of the mental and emotional wounds that characterize our lives are created here. And perhaps it’s not strange that we are drawn to fantasies about things being different. Fantasies about being alone. Floating in an empty space with just an umbilical cord connecting us to our surroundings. That economic man doesn’t match up to reality is one thing. We’ve known that for years. What’s interesting is that we so dearly want him to align with reality. Apparently we want to be like him. We want his selfsufficiency, his reason and the predictable universe that he inhabits. Most of all, we seem to be prepared to pay a high price for it.