Hello everyone, hope you are having a great weekend and are ready for the week ahead. Interesting times in the life of RealTime Cancer, as we launched an awareness event called Coins for Cancer on Friday. The event is a 31-day drive that has two purposes: To have every man, woman and child wearing one of our blue and yellow ribbons for some or all of our Drive, and to create a mountain of coins symbolizing our growing awareness/education of cancer challenges, especially within the Challenge high schools. The Drive has great potential and as with everything I’ve done with RealTime Cancer to this point, it’s our first time through. I’ll keep you posted on the events of the Drive, as the next several weeks will be very interesting. Today’s message is titled “Inside” and it relates to one of my favourite lessons learned throughout the course of my series. Hope it connects with you inside. Have a great week and I’ll be back soon.
Inside
Do you have any questions? I have a bunch of them, some I answer on a daily basis, others I answer over a period of time, and some I haven’t figured out the answer for yet. In my experience the true answer to any question I have comes from inside me. I don’t think any of us can find the answers to our questions in the outside. Not the true answers. We can find lots of things in the outside, but not the true answers.
I would suggest that many of us have the same questions, but that our answers will be quite different, as we are all our own individuals, with our own perspective, preferences and passions. I wonder “How do you get where you want to go, if you don’t know where that is?” Really though, how do you get where you want to go if you have never stopped to think about it, at least for a little bit. From my perspective, I’m not sure how you know where you want to go without thinking about it. Maybe many people figure it out much easier than I have, as for me it took a while to figure out where I wanted to go, it took time and effort, and still takes time and effort. (remember the effort I talked about last week) And that time and effort has been rewarded with great answers.
I had a really interesting conversation with a lady whom I’ve only met once. It was just a little while ago, we met for brunch one weekend just to chat. We had such an interesting and amazing conversation that I am still thinking and talking about it, and now I’ve brought it here to you. One of the things we talked about was “conditioning” and its place in our lives. How our lives are often conditioned to the point where thinking about our behaviour, our actions, our life direction, is so much an afterthought that we don’t think. We just do. Since our brunch I have thought about that conditioning conversation consistently, and I can see its place in my life and what I see is quite interesting.
I feel extremely fortunate to have been given my cancer challenge at the time I was for many reasons. Specifically I’m talking about the component of my series that provided me with a great opportunity to break that conditioned cycle. It provided me with a great opportunity to think about and do things differently than I was prior to November ‘98. And I am grateful for that opportunity, as breaking that cycle, making the time and putting in the effort to think about my life, has changed my life. I think that opportunity is as much responsible for my growth and added perspective as dealing with and facing the distinct possibility of my own death. Both have really provided great opportunity for my growth and development over the past two-plus years. And I feel as though they have laid a foundation that will provide continued opportunity for me to maintain the personal growth, if that is my choice. Which it is.
While I’ve had these opportunities and learned many of these great life lessons, I feel the most important lesson I have learned is the one I’m discussing today, and that is that everything we are searching for is inside us. All the answers to our questions, whatever they may be, they are inside. Sure there are outside elements that will help us finding those answers but I believe the actual answer comes from within.
I have this ongoing conversation with a couple of people about our North American culture throughout the past 100 years, specifically its focus on the outside. And I can think of no greater example of that than one of the “major accomplishments” of the 20th century, space travel. What a great symbol of our culture and its focus on the outside. We are often so focused on the outside that it was our mission to literally get out of this world. Another part of this conversation usually involves me bringing in my political desire, and yes I do have some, and I jokingly suggest that I’m going to run for the Prime Minister’s office on a platform of “inside”. I am going to build my national policy around the concept of going inside ourselves, providing incentives for people to do so, and turning some of our national focus on the internal component of each individual. Think it will fly? Probably not just yet, I’ll have to get really creative with the wording, but we’ll see what the next 30 years brings.
Seriously though, I have learned that the journey inside, while it may be the longest, is one with the great lessons and rewards. And learning that “inside” lesson has been one of the greatest of all my lessons learned. Whatever your questions, I can tell you that you will find the answer inside you. It’s there, and often times it will take a while and lots of effort to find, but it’s there. Everything you are looking for in this life is already within you and you can discover it. I’m sure of it.
Always…
Live Life. Love Life.
Geoff
