The Savage Garden

A few years ago, I had a revelation.

Since the first time I studied Leonardo da Vinci I was convinced I wanted to be a renaissance man. To that end I became consumed with learning, and have since become what I refer to as lifetime learner. After all, if we stop learning, what’s really the point of living?

My revelation came when one day I realized that I had devoted a great deal of time, energy, and ambition to nurturing my relationships, my spirituality, and my thirst for knowledge, but had let my professional life drift unattended for years. This lead me to an observation about Leonardo and conversely about myself. Leonardo da Vinci was a genius (which I am not), but the quality that propelled him and all other successful people was “focus”.

We’ve all seen it before; the people who knew they wanted to be a doctor, dancer, or actress since childhood and grew up to become exactly that. Every child fantasizes about what they want to be or do when they ”grow up”. But it’s the rare child/person who is able to maintain an idea of what they envision in a consistent enough way to actually create that life for themselves. This, I discovered, is my simple challenge – Maintain a consistent focused idea of areas of your life that you wish to create in a certain way. But that alone is “wishful thinking”; not entirely powerless, but incomplete.

Many of us already express this type focus in a destructive way by worrying about things we cannot control, or believing  people who tell us something is impossible or destined to fail. By doing that we create “destructive” focus. A spiritual teacher once told me that the law of attraction is not magic. When we hold a concept or idea of ourselves and our world in our consciousness we take actions based on that belief. This is how we create our dreams, through thought ” followed” by action.  The trick is discovering your gift, finding a path to express it, and staying on that path. Will you stray as you explore? Of course. If balance were easy everyone would do it.