Think this through – the people who are the most important to you were at one stage total strangers to you. Whether by coincidence or what Carl Jung might consider synchronicity – or, indeed, what a quantum physicist might consider as a type of quantum entanglement – you are where you now are as a result of apparently random events at the core of which are people who were, when you met them first, complete and utter strangers.
When we were young we were told, as many children were and still are, not to talk to strangers. Of course, there is a lot of sense in that from the point of view of protecting your children from the undoubted presence of some very strange people in this world. However, unfortunately, the subliminal message that stays with us into later life is that we should avoid getting involved with whoever we might casually encounter in the course of everyday life.
Indeed, in the course of those normal daily adult lives, the fact is that we’d never really notice a stranger anyway – because, during our formative years, we developed a self-preservational psychological facility to categorize new people that we encounter without giving any attention to who they might actually be or the importance of the role that they migh play in our lives. As a consequence of our pre-programming and our ability for categorization, we pay no attention to people that we don’t know. The next time you’re on a subway, metro, tube, bus or train or in an elevator, observe how carefully people avoid making any kind of contact at all.
What are these people missing? Perhaps the next most important complete stranger in their lives. You haven’t the first clue who might change the course of your career, who might become your most important customer ever, who might become a life-long friend and mentor. You have no idea who might be the next person to change your life. But you’re not going to find out if you can’t start paying attention.
Wake up. Opportunity abounds – but is totally missed by the automatic normal mind that’s too closed and blind to see anything. Psychology proves that the normal person only perceives what they expect to perceive and only experience what they expect to experience. What a death sentence we’ve all been given – by our programming and by our own inaction and dread of taking the small leap of faith that making personal contact with a total stranger requires.
You’ve got to open your eyes, you have to smell the roses, experience life’s opportunities and go with the flow of a world that is simply waiting to respond to you. I do not propose that you start behaving irrationally and outrageously in public places! I am suggesting that you put up your antennae, start tuning into the here and now, let yourself off the hook of your normal life. Because, until you do, you normal life will never be anything but mundanely, repetitively and boringly normal – and it will be your own stupidity.
