She called me right after the event. I could not see her but I knew her eyes were red with weeping. “I am so distraught, Professor Rao,” she cried. “My stomach is tied up in knots. I cannot think or work or eat. I feel as if Freddie Kreuger has slipped into my house.”
And then there is my long time handyman, someone I have used for years who always delivers great service at reasonable price. “Why don’t they recognize that he won? This pointless obstructionism simply ensures that we will get nothing done.” His face was lined with anger and frustration.
The 2016 Presidential election in the US has shaken up the country like no other in a century.
Yet again a presidential candidate has won the popular vote and lost the presidency.
There is hand wringing and jubilation and deathly fear and talk of the apocalypse.
I am not concerned with who you voted for or whether you did so at all. I am concerned about the fear and trepidation that has entered into your life.
Are you apprehensive that there will be a great rollback of progressive achievements?
That women will be groped and gays put back in the closet and minorities overtly harassed and hard-nosed military adventures will happen in different parts of the globe?
As of right now, these are just thoughts in your head. So is the added alarm as it becomes clearer who gets on the team that will lead America forward.
Are you joyous because there will be walls built, trade flows halted, immigration checked or even reversed and hard lines will be taken with the ‘bad guys’?
As of right now, these are also thoughts in your head. And already there are signs that campaign promises are being abandoned en masse.
I will guarantee you one thing – the future will be far different from anything that you can envision.
I have personal experience with this. I was head of Consumer Research for Data Resources in the late seventies when the personal computer was just appearing and one of my clients wanted a report on how the world would change as a result.
I created a learned thesis depicting a future where computers would take care of drudgery.
It forecast that there would be an abundance of leisure for most professionals. My team even thought that a 20-hour workweek would become the norm.
We all know how that turned out.
Thoughts in your head do have consequences. Everything that exists around you, was once a thought in someone’s head. Our system of government, the building of the World Trade Center, the felling of the World Trade Center, our financial industry web, were all thoughts in someone’s head at some point.
Thanksgiving is on us. Be truly, genuinely grateful.
Don’t be grateful for something. Whatever you are grateful for can disappear. Just be grateful.
Get a copy of my book Are YOU Ready to Succeed if you need help on how to pull this off.
And from that space of gratitude, think of the thoughts in your head. Carefully pick the ones that you would like to manifest and feed them your emotional energy.
I hope you will pick the ones that unite us and bring home that, underneath our various forms and longings, we are all human beings who want to be free of suffering.
Peace.
