If you’re a Great Thinker – and most of us at least believe that we are – you probably have a lot of Great Ideas. In fact, you may have too many. Way too many. Let’s talk about that a little bit.
Mike Dooley has a wonderful book called Choose Them Wisely: Thoughts Become Things! As the title implies, what we think will inevitably manifest in our physical lives, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, but what we think will become our physical realities.
Now, the Tarot slices our everyday lives into four quarters represented by the Minor Arcana. The suit of Cups represent our emotions, Pentacles represent our relationship with physical possessions, Swords represent our physical drives and aggressions, and Wands represent our ideas, our thoughts.
The Ten of Wands is a wonderful representation of someone who has way too many Great Ideas. Each wand represents a thought and this poor son of a bitch has SO many thoughts going on in his head that he can barely stagger along his path. He’s literally weighted down with all of his wonderful, fabulous, potentially AMAZING thoughts. So much so that he can’t even lift up his head and look at the world around him. All he can do is carry the burden of his thoughts and stare at the path that he’s on, hoping he doesn’t stumble and fall and – goddess forbid – lose his stupefying collection of Great Ideas.
The bad thing about having too many Great Ideas is that it can be just as discouraging as having too few Great Ideas. It can paralyze us. We have so many options swimming around in our heads that we just really can’t decide which direction to go in – so we go nowhere. It’s like we’re saying to ourselves, “Well, I could be a Great Artist, but if I put all of that time and energy into being a Great Artist then I won’t have any time and energy to put into being a Great Writer.”
So we sit around on our asses and worry about that and – in the meantime – we don’t write and we don’t paint. We’re stuck.
We can actually see a pretty good representation of this with The Chariot card. You can take one look at this guy and tell that he has some Great Ideas. I mean, look at those shoulder pads! Who wouldn’t want a jacket with Moon shoulders? He’s glorious! But if you take a little closer look, you see that the Sphinxes aren’t harnessed to anything and he doesn’t have any reins in his hands. He looks fabulous, but he’s not going anywhere because he doesn’t have any direction, he doesn’t have any focus. He just can’t decide which way to go.
One of Dooley’s ideas about getting out of the trap of having too few options can also be useful in dealing with having too many options. Make up a list of your options, of all of the things that you could possibly do to move forward in your life, and then choose the three LEAST SUCKY options and move forward with those.
If you have too many Great Ideas, that may sound like a daunting task, but it really isn’t. My experience is that a lot of my Great Ideas can be slotted under the category of, “Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen.” For instance, when I was in Junior High School, I got it into my head that I wanted to jump hurdles on the track team. And I would have been absolutely amazing at it except for the fact that everyone in my family has short legs and I kept jumping into the hurdles instead of over them.
In the same sense, if you’ve always dreamed of being a porn star and you have a small penis, that, “Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen.” It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with my short legs or your small penis, it’s just not a good fit. So to speak.
So we can winnow out a lot of our Great Ideas from the get-go. And, as we do that, we find that a lot of them are actually pretty Sucky Ideas. Eventually, as we continue to work on our lists of Great and Sucky Ideas, we’ll come down to the three that are the least Sucky and we can move forward with those.
This is the point where a lot of us get paralyzed again. Should I really give up on my life-long dream of being a world famous Juggler on the Ed Sullivan Show, just because Ed Sullivan is dead? Am I making a dreadful mistake in abandoning my idea of being a Topless Cellist at Carnegie Hall?
This is also where Mike Dooley came up with a genius concept: IT DOESN’T MATTER.
No matter what we choose, it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to choose something and then start moving forward with it. That’s probably the single most important thing that we can do: get off of our asses and start moving. And, as we begin to move forward – with ANYTHING – the Universe will provide the next step and then the next step and then the next step and eventually we end up exactly where we want to be.
That takes a tremendous load off of our shoulders, especially if we’re Great Thinkers with lots of Great Ideas. We really don’t have to decide too much. We don’t have to spend endless hours analyzing our options, playing scenario tapes in our heads, and fretting over possible disasters. All we have to do is figure out a couple of our least sucky options and start moving toward them. We provide the moving feet and the Universe provides the path to walk on.
As Dooley put it, “Do WHAT you can, with WHAT you’ve got, from WHERE you are, and it will ALWAYS be enough.”
And we can overcome any hurdles. Or, if we’ve got short legs, we can learn to run sprints. It’s all good. It’s all just right.
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