The Best Laid Plans…

Most people believe that their lives are largely a matter of cause and effect

with a substantial dose of random chance (or luck, if you prefer). Some see destiny as being involved. They are wrong. Life is an experssion of choices and the creativity with which all consciousness is richly endowed.

I have been viewing life from that perspective for over 30 years, and I will admit that there have been times and circumstances that were difficult to see within that context. I have always been able to do it, nonetheless. Now it is almost always easy and obvious to me, because I’ve done it so many times.

One of the best tools I have had with which to hone my ability to translate conventional experiences and circumstances into ones that affirm our power, authorship, and creativity are the countless people I’ve known, or known of, whose lives themselves were proof. Nick Vujicic is one of those people. Rather than tell you about Nick, I’ll let him tell you himself. Watch this video before reading on.


From my perspective, and I hope from Nick’s, it seems abundantly clear that here is a man who, in that thought-incubator between lives, asked himself, “I wonder what it would be like to be born severely challenged physically, and to then find my way to a wonderful life, and in the process become a charismatic teacher to millions?” That question, or one like it, must have drawn his attention, his imagination, his love, and ultimately his total comittment. What you have just seen is his answer to that question. Think he did okay? I sure do.

What I want you to ask yourself is this: how better could anyone have become who this amazing man became? When someone else encourages you to keep trying to get up after you fall, it’s just words, metaphor, and abstraction. But when Nick shows you, it’s profoundly real.

Nick is a miracle worker, not so much because of how he turned his “victimhood” into valor, but because of the brilliance of the strategy through which he did it. That is the real secret to the miracle worker in each of us.

Look at your life, or anyone’s, and ask yourself this: “What purposes could not be accomplished better in any other way?” The answer, if you are patient and sincere, will tell you why you came here and perhaps even help you to understand what may lay ahead for you in the furtherance of that purpose.

I can tell you from my own personal experience, and I hope Nick and others would agree, that seeing how you set up the specific challenges you have, in the exact ways you did, to enable you to solve them and grow in the process, is a heartrending and beautiful experience.

Thank-you Nick, and all the others, who have, by there extraordinary examples, shown us all how we engage in the benevolent conspiracies that form the dramas of our lives. Illustrating this principle was among my primary purposes in writing When Gulls Fly Low (see link at top right of this page for more). If I could only offer one gift to someone, it just might be this vision of their life purpose and how everything they have ever experienced occurred in service of that desire. I hope this has nudged you farther in that direction. Let me know if it did. I’d love to hear your story, just as I loved hearing Nick’s.

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