New Perspective: Stand Up, Rock the Boat

“If you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always got.”

This quote has been ascribed to Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and even Tony Robbins. Regardless of who said this first, to me, it’s meaning is profound: if nothing changes, nothing changes. So, my invitation to you today is to stand up and rock the boat!

I want my life to be different, but am I making different choices?

I want my relationships to improve, but am I looking at them with the same old perspective?

I want more success, abundance, peace of mind, or whatever it is that I want, but am I choosing in a way that allows for freedom from my past, or am I simply regurgitating the same old stories?

The English alphabet consists of 26 letters. We form our words and compose our sentences based on the knowledge of these 26 letters. No more, no less. Our knowledge informs our vocabulary, language, reason, speech, communication, all of it. Would you agree? It begins with the alphabet that we were taught, that we learned a long time ago.

Now let us think about our choices. We make choices every day, with the vocabulary of our past beliefs. If we have tasted vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice creams and loved chocolate the most and strawberry the least, this past learning will more often than not inform our future decisions regarding which ice cream flavor we choose, unless, we deliberately choose from a new perspective and not one based in the past.

The residue of our experiences, good, bad and indifferent, provide us with an emotional alphabet with which we write our own destiny, literally spelling out the future. And here is when we either condemn ourselves to reliving flashbacks or consciously choosing to compose and create our life.

We learn from the experiences of our past, yes. But recycling old experiences or living in freeze frame fails to deliver the life we truly desire or deserve. In order to live a fully self-expressed life, we must first encounter the Self we wish to express.

It’s time to shake things up. Disrupt old patterns. Cut through the complacency of past belief systems (or B.S). It’s time to stand up, rock the boat. Perhaps, it is time to jump off the boat and swim or learn to swim. Maybe it’s time to trust, to surrender and take a leap. Or simply leap first and trust that the net will appear. Any way you choose to look at it, the only way to have something different is to do something different.

1. Krishnamurti says we need to think in new ways. The way we think now is based on our closely held belief systems and our knowledge of what is “known” and familiar to us. It is in choosing freedom from what is known that we find radical freedom and authority of our true self. To create new pathways in our mind we must delete the past programming and operating system like a computer and reformat our drive, be blank, start from nothing, at zero, arrive at emptiness to truly appreciate the beauty that is present in a rose, in the leaves as they rustle when the breeze blows through the branches of a banyan tree, in the smile of a child, in the simplest of stuff, the kind we usually miss.

To stand up and rock the boat in my understanding is to challenge the status quo. To be in a state of inquiry and introspection. To ask a question and wait for the answer, patiently. What’s the rush? Stand up and rock the boat is the contrarian’s approach to sitting down, so as to not. Conformity kills creativity and thwarts self-expression, as there is no known self to express. Your individual unique snowflake-self craves connection, so stand up, rock the boat.