How can I get what I want?
The age-old question. First I'll comment on the traditional meaning of it. To get what we want it is necessary to make what's known as a "real decision."
A number of times in my life I've reached a point where I simply made a decision to do something. Most usually this was something that I had little or no experience or background in. But I've found that the simple act of making a true decision about something sets wheels in motion that I couldn't have imagined.
Inevitably there are challenges and obstacles. But once the real decision is made then we just go about solving the obstacles one by one, learning how to do whatever-it-is by doing it.
As Goethe said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power in it."
Let's take a practical example. Let's say you've been a firefighter for 20 years, but you want to become a psychotherapist. Just to make things interesting, you have a mortgage to pay and children to feed. You'd like to do this...but the risk and uncertainty just seem too great.
If this is really right for you—that is, if your inner guide or energy or whatever-we-want-to-call-it is really moving in that direction, you'll find yourself making a "decision" to do this and the instant you do something will feel very right inside. You're flowing with the river, following your inner guidance.
The thing to do now is just to do something each day to forward your decision. Maybe you start by just reading a book about Freud or psychotherapy. Or maybe you send for a growth center catalog and sign up for a therapy course. Or maybe you go talk to a few therapists and ask them where they got their training and what their day is like.
Whatever it is, we start bringing some reality to our decision by taking some kind of action on it each day. And then it becomes more real. As Stephen Covey pointed out, those plants grow that we water each day.
And strangely enough, if we're following our inner guidance, this "decision" will feel inside like flowing down the river in great trust, even though on the outside we may be working very hard or encountering many challenges.
As many spiritual teachers have pointed out, getting what we want doesn't actually bring us true happiness because it's a mind-state dependent on conditions and thus very fragile. But it can be helpful to discover that for ourselves.
Down the road, our "real decisions" arise out of listening to our inner guide and immediately falling into action about them. Thus there is little or no sense of "decision" about them.
—jim sloman, fall 2000 for Jan 26
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