12. I’m Too Old (or Not Old Enough)
The age of your body can seem to be quite an obstacle on the road to changing long-held thinking habits, particularly since you received an extensive list of memes concerning age very early on.

Depending on where you grew up, you heard statements such as: “You can’t ride your bicycle until you’re seven,” “You can’t sleep over until you’re ten,” “You can’t drive a car until you’re 16,” and “You can’t have sex until you’re married.” Then at some point you discovered that you went from being not old enough to being too old!

The New Year is upon us and if you are like so many, you made some resolutions and already have relented or let go of some of your ambitions. Every year millions of people do just that. There is such hope in the approach of a new beginning and yet it is so easy to just let that hope slip into forgotten dreams of the past.

I have spoken with many people do not remember their New Year resolutions from years past. If you think about it for a moment, do you remember your resolutions from five years ago, from two years ago, indeed, from last year? Why is it we forget so quickly? First we resign ourselves to relenting and then we forget what we relented–is that instructional? I think so.

Key Lesson: Seen properly, what is any dark mental or emotional habit – such as fearfully trying to protect ourselves from what “may be” – other than the unconscious practice of perfecting what punishes us?

Here is a particularly vital idea for those of us who are tired of finding ourselves a surprised victim of our own actions: in this world of ours, response is request. We can slightly enlarge this idea by restating it this way: The way you respond to life is also a request you make to it. See how the next example proves this important discovery.

We have been taught that to use the law of attraction to create the reality we desire, we must focus more on what we want and less on what we don’t want. But yet there are times when the things we don’t want continue to be created even though we try not to focus on them. The truth is that there are times when we must focus on what we don’t want so that we can attract it out fully and see it for what it is. What we don’t want could be part of what we want and that is why we are still creating it unknowingly.