“You create your own life”

(Written in November 2004)
A friend is having trouble with the idea that “you create your own life.” I think it’s a reflection of Western Culture’s obsession with control and refusal to accept vulnerability.  I used the image of a sailboat to express my sense of it: we don’t control the wind or the tide, we do control our handling of the boat.  I also told her something about chaos mathematics, and holding a vision as providing a “strange attractor”.  Sitting here now I’m thinking that the idea of “creating my own life” feels very narrow and claustrophobic.  I’d much rather see my life as a co-creation — something I do with the people who are closest to me, and all the other people and creatures on the planet, and Spirit for sure.  My life is like a river, taking its shape partly by the amount and direction of its flow, but also by the conditions of the territory it’s flowing through.  What I call the “center line of my life” is something that I find rather than create, or perhaps something I created before I incarnated this time, something that I can choose to align with or not, something that I’m always finding more out more about as I continue on the path.