Heroes Not Zombies

I was never aware of the “Belt of Venus” before I moved to South West France. The first time I saw it, I thought, how come there’s that’s pink colour just above the Western horizon as the Sun rises in the East? When I looked it up, I discovered it was the “Belt of Venus”. Since then, I’ve noticed it many times.

I suspect I am more likely to look towards the East in the morning as Dawn breaks, and to the West in the evening as the gorgeous sunsets transform the sky into works of gold, tobacco brown and all shades of red.

But now I know to look the other way. I look towards the West when I am up at dawn, and what beautiful rewards await me for making that decision.

We are creatures of habit. We tend to observe in habitual ways. We tend to think in habitual ways. So, we repeat the same experiences again and again. Sometimes that can be a good thing, when our habits bring us joy, comfort and contentment. But, it seems to me that often those habits extort a high price, keeping us stuck, blinding us to opportunities, engulfing us in rumination and regret.

So, I find it’s good to look the other way sometimes. Not as in denial, neglect or in choosing ignore someone or something which needs our attention, but in consciously setting up the opportunities to change the tune, to open a few more doors, to release our abilities to imagine and to dream….in other words to increase our joy, our wonder and our delight, and to embrace our natural capacities to create, to invent, and to change.

You might think that this is a call to do the opposite of whatever it is you are doing, but I don’t think it’s limited to that. Looking to the West in the morning is not a simple opposite to looking to the East (after all, I do look to the East to see the sun rising as well). It’s more about expanding the attention, stepping out of narrow, well-trodden paths, and seeing what else is here…..right here, right now.

This exercise of looking the other way is, for me, one of releasing myself from the familiar, sticky, narrow focus of the left brain, to develop the broader, novel-seeking, particular-seeking, connection-making focus of the right brain.