Do be do be do… .
Frank Sinatra, Strangers In The Night
To be or not to be? To do or not to do? These are the questions.
I so love The Secret. The Law of Attraction has such resonance for me. We attract to ourselves that which exists in our lives: joy, prosperity, peace, possibility, dissonance, despair and paucity.
It is the essential authenticity of our being that matters.
The Buddhists and the mystics agree: nothing to be, nothing to do, nothing to have. We are the flow. We are drops of the Divine in the ocean of infinite possibility. Showing up, being in the eternal now, is all that is required.
As Co-Creators, we have the capacity to bring forth, to manifest all that we can dream and imagine. There is nothing for us to do but to be open to the abundance of the Universe. All that is necessary is to be present fully and completely to all that is.
“Thoughts become things,” Mike Dooley says. “Choose the good ones.”
But here’s were I get into trouble. It seems to me that if we just sit in the middle of a freeway thinking good thoughts, we may end up getting run over by a truck. If we lay about eating Krispy Creams, the cardiologist will show up long before the Pulitzer.
It’s where a lot of folks get bogged down in the whole Law of Attraction thing, I think. Good thoughts are not enough.
You gotta do, too.
Creation is an action sport. It requires us to get out of bed in the morning. It requires us to get our of our comfort zones. It requires us to get out of the safety and security and predictability of our daily grinds. It requires us to risk. It requires us to fail. It requires us to show up every day whether we want to our not. It requires us to use our hearts and our minds and our souls and our bodies.
It requires us to act boldly and audaciously. And courageously.
It demands all of us – every last piece of us. And nothing less.
Our words and our actions are our thoughts and our dreams made manifest.
Rodin imagined The Thinker. But the bronze and marble didn’t spring forth by itself. Edison imagined the incandescent light. But it took him 10,000 tries to get it right. Armstrong dreamed of walking on the moon. But it required a very long ride to get there.
Even small actions, small steps, taken day in and day out, result in the magnificent achievements we imagine, the grand cathedrals of our lives.
But here’s the Edge: Action without being is empty, hollow, and ultimately joyless and without meaning. We can get lost in the goals, the lists, the mind maps and the projects. We can lose our very selves in constant doing. The doing for the sake of doing will burn us out.
Sartre said: “To be is to do.” Socrates said: “To do is to be.”
Frank said: “Do be do be do.”
It’s the balance between the two.
Frank had it right. Do you?
When you love the path, your dreamed-of destination becomes almost incidental, and happiness becomes a daily affair.
— Mike Dooley, Infinite Possibilities
I love this article, Walt! Absolutely love it. And what I’ve been dancing with of late is how to keep my thoughts aligned with what I “want,” observe AND appreciate “what is;” in other words, notice the gap (the growth opportunity, the movement and path toward a goal, an act that constitutes a step but not a completion) but not “notice” to such an extent that my thoughts create more “gap.” Do be do be do! So far: appreciate the do as I do.
Frank’s “do be do be do” is way easier to digest than Heidegger on “Being”–nicely put Walt.. Not sure what this says about my accident–always wanted a truck with extended cab but really I wasn’t expecting or thinking of this collision in space and I knew the person–listening to the possibilities..I had heard back from the top SIV acro coach the same day–not sure what this means–flying is safer.. “Creation is an action sport”–nicely put–thanks for the wonderful inspiration—Life flashes before our eyes in an instant so be fully present in all that you do! I am appreciating the adrenaline I create in my own actions..