Years ago I became friends with an engineer. He was very intelligent, very gifted, very sensible (and very attractive, but that's another story!). We talked a lot about life - what it meant, how to live it well. He pretty much had it all figured out, as engineers tend to do. And on the surface, it appeared we were living by the same set of rules. You know the ones: work hard in school, get good grades, find a solid job after graduation, work hard, seek positions with increasing levels of authority and compensation, work hard, provide well for your family, work hard, be a good corporate and community citizen...above all, work hard. Work long. Anything worthwhile in life is worth working for. These were rules to live
by.

Or were our very lives being strangled by rules? Those rules weren't working for me anymore, and perhaps they never had. I told my friend, boldly, that I had different ideas: I had radical life views. I actually used those words! Yet when he asked me to elaborate, I couldn't. I knew only that life as we understood it was not life as it was meant to be. I knew there was more - I knew the universe had its own set of rules that didn't work the way our rules worked. And so I had to figure out my radical life views; after all, I wanted to explain them to my very smart yet skeptical friend! He believed me to be intelligent, and was actually very curious about what these unusual views might be. He trusted me in a
way I did not yet trust myself: he figured if I believed something, there must be something to it. And indeed there was.

That initial conversation took place more than 14 years ago. For much of the time between then and now, my life appeared to be governed by those same rules I had so impulsively rejected. I worked hard, and I constantly sought positions of increasing responsibility and compensation. I learned the corporate lingo and set my sights on a big office in the executive suite. And yet...the inner knowing that life was meant to be so much more would not be ignored. Almost without my own conscious permission, I began exploring life outside of the rules that were ruling my life. In this other life I felt alive, passionate and deeply connected to others. Of course, I knew that wasn't the "real world" .... or was it? What if it was more real than the real world? What if I'd accepted those rules without question, not understanding that I could choose to live by a different set of rules? What if life was not meant to be a struggle? What if life was meant to be lived in joy?

Such a notion may seem naïve or even preposterous in our post-9/11 world; the evidence seems to indicate overwhelmingly that life is a fearful proposition - a struggle, certainly. But what is evidence? According to my dog-eared copy of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, evidence is "an outward sign;" the word evident is defined as "clear to the vision and understanding." If we allow ourselves to ask, "An outward sign of what?" we may stumble upon the realization that it is an outward sign of our inner understanding - an outward sign of our beliefs about the world and how it works. As our understanding and vision expand, our interpretation of events shifts and changes. When we believed the world to
be flat, all observed phenomena were interpreted as proof of that indisputable fact. Ships sailing too close to the edge of the world fell off - how else to explain their disappearance? And so we lived in a closed, flat world until our willingness to believe in a different possibility literally expanded our horizons.

Our inner understanding not only shapes our interpretation of events, it powerfully guides our every choice. And with every choice, every action, we produce more evidence of the same inner beliefs. So "evidence" may prove only that, within the holding vessel of our collective beliefs, certain outcomes are predictable. But what if we change the vessel? If everyone believed that life was meant to be lived in
joy rather than fear, would we not be living in a fundamentally different world? Isn't now - post 9/11 - the best time to adopt radical life views, beliefs that can produce evidence of a joyful existence? I believe it is.

Let's be willing to challenge our inner understanding of who we are and how life works. What we believe, so we experience. When we believe that life is a struggle and that we must work hard, we act - and we attract - according to that belief. And so we keep producing evidence that confirms the seeming correctness of it. Our deepest longings - for meaning, purpose, passion and joy - drift further and further from our consciousness. If we're aware of them at all, we judge them to be impractical. But what if the real business of life is putting those longings into practice?

When I was a little girl, I loved to write and draw. I thought of myself as a writer and an artist! And my beloved third-grade teacher, who once shared with our class a story that she'd written about discovering the rich and varied lives her former students had grown into, saw me as a poet. But who makes a living as a poet?! I learned that grown-ups get real jobs and make real money. I majored in accounting and economics in college, then marched headlong into a demanding corporate career. In short order I no longer merely believed that grown-ups are supposed to get real jobs and make real money, I was a grown-up with a real job and real money. The belief itself had disintegrated into the murky depths of my psyche; it became transparent, and so it was no longer available to me as a distinct assumption I could thoughtfully examine. It had become a personal truth: this is the way life is.

I had blindly embraced a whole constellation of beliefs around the notion that life is a struggle: I had to work hard (doing work I didn't particularly like; after all, if I liked it then it wouldn't be work!), I had to make a lot of money, and I had to keep doing that until I retired. And my ongoing experience of working at a corporate job anchored that constellation firmly into my universe.

And then I woke up. Not all at once, of course, but slowly, inexorably. I came to see that my adopted beliefs were not unassailable facts of life, they were assumptions I'd taken on and reinforced through my own actions. I discovered their astonishing potency, and realized I had mistakenly allowed my experience of being a corporate finance professional to stand in for the truth about who I was. I began to excavate - surely the real me was in there somewhere. By golly, I'm not a corporate finance professional - I'm a writer! I'm an artist! And I'm not afraid to use exclamation points! Because now I understand that passion and inspiration are not meant to be fleeting experiences that punctuate an otherwise sensible life; they are central to a life of meaning and purpose, and it is our joyous duty to cultivate them with loving intention.

So now I'm choosing a whole new set of beliefs about how life is, beliefs that generate a sense of clarity and freedom rather than drudgery and confinement. It is my sincerest hope that, in creating this newsletter to share these "radical life views" with you, I can stimulate and affirm the
insights that will support your own journey of personal transformation. I've come to understand that, ultimately, we're not limited by our history; we're limited by our blindness to who we really are.

So don't make the mistake of filing "what's happened so far" into the folder marked "what's possible." That folder is a holding space for your longings and your passion, your tucked-away dreams and musings and tingles. Fill it to overflowing and allow yourself to be inspired! Challenge yourself to believe that life - your life - is meant to be lived in joy. Of course you'll doubt it, but challenge yourself anyway...the worst that can happen is, you may discover that you're right.