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You
are here:
New Beginnings
A couple of years ago I put my professional life on hold to help care for our older son following a serious operation. What happened to him changed the course of his life overnight. During his long recovery in the hospital, I had lots of time to think and I had a lot of new learning to do as he has been reinventing his life.
How many of you have faced an unexpected challenge--hopefully not of this magnitude, but maybe greater--and found your life rerouted? How many of you have had this happen more than once? Take a few moments to recapture that time--what did you do?
One day during his hospitalization, our son was asked by a psychologist, "What is your secret? You have lost your fiancee, your career, you can no longer do Tai Chi, scuba dive or climb mountains, you are disabled and in a wheelchair. Why aren't you depressed? As a matter of fact, why aren't you suicidal?" Rob told me that evening that he was so amazed by insensitivity of the question that he wondered if the man could understand his answer. He had replied, "Well you accept what is, then take it from there to create a new future," and he has been doing just that. What is ironic is that he was a highly successful acupuncturist who helped many people who others had given up as hopeless. He was also a master and teacher of do Tai Chi who had control over every muscle in his body. Now that his circumstances have changed, he has not abandoned the skills he developed earlier in life. In fact, he recently wrote an article called "Tai Chi for the Differently Abled" --or how to do Tai Chi in a wheelchair.
If you have a load of lemons delivered to you, what do you do? Do you store them in a back room until they begin to rot and draw fruit flies and pollute the air? Do you find a cold dark place for them where they will just turn hard and black and useless? Do you open the windows and start pitching them out, sometimes accidentally hitting unsuspecting passersby?--Or do you open a lemonade stand? What you do with those lemons will make all the difference in your life from that point on.
I'd like to tell you stories about lemonade stand operators from whom I've learned a lot about reinventing life.
- Darlene Hughs Axtell Shares a Story: Not Lemons, But Apples
- Meet Marilyn King: Realizing Olympic Achievement
- Meet Renee Fuller: Realizing Human Intelligence
You have the potential to be an inventor, an innovator, a creative thinker. What is your story?-- or what are your stories? How do you tell them to yourself and to others? How do your stories affect the world around you? And they do!
This has a lot to do with a concept that British scientist Richard Dawkins calls "memes." Just as genes guide the development of the human body, so memes guide the development of a culture or society. These can sometimes act like viruses--those are the rotting lemons or the black lemons, or the ones that get thrown at people. (violent films, front page murder and mayhem stories, pornography on the Internet are examples--and they proliferate just as viruses do.) Good memes are stories that also proliferate--stories like Renee's and yours--stories that can have effects far beyond those we can imagine.
Sometimes we think that the stories we tell ourselves are personal and private and have nothing to do with anyone else. But our stories will be told and retold. Our stories and how we live them out affect the world around us in ways beyond our imagining. And it all starts with the story you tell yourself as you reinvent your life when you are faced with the next unexpected challenge.
What you do with the lemons will make all the difference.
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