The Grand Endless: A signpost for creating what you want in life
Image credit: Linda Wilson (Unsplash)
Life has a funny way of providing you with hints or signals to show you that you're on the right path even when (sometimes especially when) things are feeling murky, uncertain, confusing or downright scary.
I once had the pleasure of seeing Lubomyr Melnyk in concert to celebrate his 70th birthday. The composer and pianist, known as The Prophet of the Piano, spent decades at the fringes of classical music, generally unable to get recognition or acknowledgement for his innovative and utterly transcendent soundscapes.
Lubomyr creates what is called “continuous music” by playing notes with both hands extremely fast in a complex structure with harmonic overtones and sympathetic resonances akin to the sitar. There is something in his character and music that is other-worldly and paradoxical. His style in discussing and playing his music is mild-mannered and humble. And yet, he seems to channel fluid and surging sounds from some other realm of the universe. He is the point at which chaos and stillness meet. A prophet indeed!
My Irish companion for the evening said his music reminded her of the River Corrib that runs through Galway City in the west of Ireland. Although the river is among the shortest in Europe, it has an unusually high flow rate which, according to my friend, helps generate the city’s poetic and magical energy.
Lubomyr ended the evening with the premier of a piece entitled “The Grand Endless” and it got me thinking about the work that I do in guiding people and organisations through the creative process. The work I do is not restricted to creating beautiful works of art, though it can be used for that. It starts with an awareness that you are, in fact, creating the outcomes and situations that you experience through the choices you make. From that awareness, you can learn and apply tools and techniques for connecting to your inner knowing, your intuition, and create what you truly desire in your lives.
Sometimes, the life you lead and the choices you make can feel endless and unfulfilling. Maybe the January blues kick in and your New Year’s resolutions start to hold less weight, relevance and hope for you to become the person you dreamed of, the person that someone else’s Instagram post inspired you to be. Maybe a global health crisis starts to make you feel like helpless and hopeless victims of circumstance that have no power to change your world. Or maybe it’s just boring to be sitting at your desk again on another lonely Monday. The endlessness can feel exhausting and overwhelming, like being swept up and carried away in the torrents of a fast-flowing river.
And yet, there is something grand, something magnificent and liberating, in that endlessness. Life is endless. The universe is seemingly endless. It was around for billions and billions of years before you arrived and will continue for billions and billions more when you are gone. Summer has become winter, which will one day turn again to summer and then again back to winter and so on and so on. So be it! There is nothing that you or I can do to stop one season from changing into the next, to stop the river from flowing, to stop another Monday from coming.
But if you can accept, settle into and move with the inevitable and endless rhythms of life, grand and new possibilities begin to open up for you. You can learn to play with those rhythms, ride them, harness them and create what you would truly love in life. Creation is one of the most powerful forces and energies in the universe. It is the source of all life, all art, all thought, all speech, all action.
The source of creation is the endlessness of life itself. That is its paradox! The workweek gives rise and energy to the weekend you enjoy. The autumn leaves on the forest floor break down to nourish the seedlings of spring. And the endlessness of your existence creates the impetus for meaning and action.
This is not some knee-jerk reaction to go for the opposite of what you don’t want. It is an opportunity to see things for what they are, to acknowledge the endlessness for what it is. And then to use it as your source, your fuel and your inspiration — to create and manifest what you truly desire for yourself in the time that you have. It is an opportunity to see your existence for what it is and then to take ownership of and joy in where you are and what you want to accomplish and be in this life.
When you start to do that, when you start to see your life and everything in them as your own creation, you begin to see life as a curious investigation and discovery of what it is that you truly desire. You begin to explore and experiment. You begin to enjoy the dead ends and wrong turns that show you what you don’t want as much as the joys and surprises that show you what you do. You begin to move past feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. You begin to live from and through the choices you make. You begin to flow like a river, generating your own poetic and magical energy. You begin to make your own continuous music. And you begin to see the grand in the endless.