Three Principles Living

Judith A. Sedgeman, EdD

Here’s To New Adventures

Here’s To New Adventures

On December 20, I will leave my office at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee for the last time and step into a new life adventure. I have loved my work and my time at USFSM and cherish the friendships I have made here, but my heart is with the global promise of Innate Health and its potential to help mankind. If you are a follower/reader of this Blog who has accessed it through the IPPL web-site, please make note that you will be able to continue to access it directly, at http://ippl2010.wordpress.com. I will continue to post frequently to Peace of Mind Matters.

One of the unanticipated benefits of dropping the burden of insecure thinking is that you lose your fear of change. I think often of a good friend of my parents, with whose children I grew up, who worked for the U.S. Government for 35 years and then retired. Every time our families got together, for years, he would engage in wistful conversations with my father about what he really wanted to do with his life. But he never found the courage to leave a secure, well-paying, good position and heed the call of his dream. He would step up to the entry of a new life, and then his mind would fill with what-if’s, and worries, and he would step back. He died regretting that he had never lived his dream.

My Father, on the other hand, lived by inspiration. Over the course of his life (he still had incomplete consulting projects under way when he died at 80), he stepped into the work that touched his heart and soul at the time, and seemed to love everything he undertook. His energy and enthusiasm for contributing his talents never flagged, and he never let circumstances (even money and prestige) stand between him and his heart. He died fulfilled, his life enriched by an wide range of work and life experiences.

Security is an internal experience, unrelated to where we’re going or what we’re doing or what’s happening around us. People who live at peace, in a grateful state of mind, awake to the moment, seem to stumble constantly  into unanticipated opportunity. And they have no fear of taking on new challenges. People who live in stress, in an upset state of mind, distracted by their worries, anxieties or regrets seem to miss opportunity altogether, or sidestep it when they glimpse it, overriding their inspiration with negative thinking about what could go wrong.

This is just another aspect of life in which peace of mind matters. Change is natural and delightful to those at peace. Change is unnatural and frightening to those who are not at peace. Without realizing that change will happen with or without them, they cling to the known and feel left out and disconnected.

It’s easy to see this playing out at the personal level. But it’s true, too, of whole societies. Much of the social, cultural and political distress that we suffer is really the attempt of insecurity and fear to put the brakes on the forward momentum of evolving ideas and institutions. The more individuals are mired in insecurity, the more difficult social, cultural and political life becomes for everyone because the flow into the future is dammed up by the force of those who want to hold onto the present or return to the past.

This can change in the blink of a thought, and that is my hope and commitment. It’s comfortable and easy for people to wake up to the realization of what they’re creating with their own thinking, and see that allowing their thinking to settle and flow naturally will set them free to embrace change.

In the words of Sydney Banks, “Discard the restless, haunting ghosts of yesterday and set yourself free to live the beauty of today.”

2 Comments
  • Beautiful in its simplicity and full of love. Security is indeed an internal experience.
    Thanks for sharing

    December 16, 2011 at 10:44 am
  • Another beautiful article! You are an inspiration!

    December 17, 2011 at 1:03 pm

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