Invited Obstacles

“You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals.”
-Booker T. Washington

There are lots of ways to treat and greet an oncoming New Year with possibility.

We can commit to resolutions.

We can assess the stats of our goal attainment for the last year and make new stretch commitments.

We can capture our intentions of who we want to be in the next 12 months in a theme, and make plans to live by that theme…posting reminders everywhere.

Yet, in any and all ways we propose to take our life into new realms of who or where we can be and what we can do or have in the next 365 days or less, know that it will invite obstacles.

We can’t expand until stretched to new proportions, and many a resolution, goal or theme are abandoned when the invited roadblocks naturally come.

When JFK was rousing American sentiment to take on a huge commitment to the space program, he quoted a story told by Irish writer Frank O’Conner. O’Conner and his childhood friends would walk the countryside trying to find the biggest wall, and then throw their hats over it.

In those days, your hat was a prized possession, and your mother would be quite upset were you to show up at the end of the day without it. So, this left the boys with no option but to find some way over that wall to retrieve their hats.

Though one could make an argument – from a Law of Attraction perspective – that inviting struggle is a no no…I believe it’s all in the flavor and intent of the invitation.

Most folks invite struggle all the time, albeit unconsciously, through the obsolete or unexamined attitudes they bring with them as baggage into any new job, business, relationship, hobby, venture, activity, or group. That is what LOA is speaking to.

However, to set one’s sites on some rather extraordinary ways one wants to be, do and have life, to get into the actions, mindset and visioning process of achieving those be/do/haves, and then to invite with willing abandon all that the Universe needs to bring to support you to have it – good, bad and ugly) — that’s another thing entirely.

We might call that an act of realistic and practical intention. A good phrase I once heard, for it is “Throwing yourself on the sword.” Not waiting to be cut open, but offering yourself to such a process for the sake of the greater Self, breaking free within.

This takes Back Forty Boldness, and definitely Back Forty Badassity…and yet, what else do you have to do in the next 40 years anyway?

Though contrary to the giddiness of listing high aims and objectives, perhaps a sober and conscious Open Letter of Invitation to Obstacles over the next few days will serve our 2017 of growth even better.

“You can either allow the obstacles in your life to be the excuse for your failure or make them the reason behind your success. ”
-Unknown