Think this through – the people who are currently most important to you were once total strangers to you. Whether by chance or what Carl Jung might view as synchronicity – or, indeed, what a quantum physicist might consider as a derivation of quantum entanglement – you are where you are as a result of apparently random events at the core of which are people who were, when you first encountered them, complete and utter strangers.
When I was growing up I was told, as many children were and still are, not to talk to strangers. There may well be a good deal of sense in that from the point of view of protecting one’s children from the undoubted presence of some very strange people in this world. But, unfortunately, the subliminal subconscious message that stays with us into adulthood is that we should avoid getting involved with whoever we might casually encounter in the course of everyday life.
And, as we go about our normal daily adult lives, the fact is that we wouldn’t really notice a stranger anyway – because, in childhood, we developed a self-preservational psychological facility to categorize new people that we encounter without giving any attention to who they actually are or the importance of the role that they migh play in our lives. As a result 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 tube, subway, bus or train or in an elevator, notice how carefully people avoid making eye contact.
What are all those people missing? Perhaps the next most important total stranger who could change the course of their lives. You’ve no idea 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 simply don’t know who might be the next person to change your life. But you’ll never find out if you don’t open your eyes.
Pull yourself together. Opportunity abounds – but is totally missed by the automatic normal mind that’s too closed and blind to see anything. Psychology confirms that the normal person only perceives what they expect to perceive and only experience what they expect to experience. What a death sentence we all are given – by our programming and by our own inaction and unwillingness to take the small leap of faith that making personal contact with a total stranger requires.
You need to open your eyes, you’ve got to smell the roses, become aware of 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 acting irrationally and outrageously in public places! I’m proposing that you put up your antennae, start tuning into the here and now, let yourself off the lead of the normal outlook. Because, until you do, you normal life will never be anything but mundanely, repetitively and boringly normal – and it will be your own fault.
