What Is “Opportunity”?

Opportunity comes in many forms

Georgia O’Keefe said, “I have always been terrified. But that has never stopped me from doing anything I’ve wanted to do.”

Opportunity is simply this: the result of a willingness to change. It comes when we are open to the possibilities, to the patterns of our lives. Opportunity becomes change when we recognize that something has come to an end and we are ready to let go of it and that something new now has room to begin. Opportunity is a giving up and a welcoming in. No new movement comes until there is a clearing out process first.

Personally, I believe that life moves in seven-year cycles. It has always manifested that way in my life – Relationships, work, challenges, with everything there is a creative time, a peak where performance is at it’s ultimate, and a disintegration – a letting go. This cycle must happen so that letting go can take place and new cycles can begin. This does not mean that relationships only last seven years, but they may change and grow, and change and grow many times throughout ones lifetime. The end of the cycles, the transition times, are always the most difficult. But perhaps it’s really the beginnings that we have a hard time with . The “opportunities.”

Grandma Moses said “If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.” Opportunity is creating promise in our lives through our hopes and our dreams, through our visions. We create opportunity in our lives by not only being ready for them but by actually manifesting them. Much of life is an outward manifestation of our internal musings, our fantasies and thoughts about ourselves. We have all heard “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Julia Cameron, the author of Artist’s Way : A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, 10th Anniversary Edition, wrote “The unlived life is not worth examining.” We live the life we create with our thoughts and beliefs. As we see it, it is and we become it. It is, as if by magic, manifested in our lives. The reason most of us don’t recognize it for the process that it is is because it is not IMMEDIATE. We are so dependent upon IMMEDIATE gratification for our needs that we have lost our ability to see the cause and effect relationship of our own thoughts and the world around us.

Therefore, if an opportunity for a good day is simply waking up and saying “this is going to be a great day,” and then aligning your thoughts with opportunities for great things to happen all day long, we do create those opportunities. They may not be what we imagined them to be, (for example, a traffic jam may be a perfect opportunity to hear a wonderful piece of music that you otherwise would have missed….) but we can use our innate abilities to draw those opportunities to us and learn to appreciate every single moment of our days.

Opportunity comes in many forms. It comes as we are ready for it, as we are changing. The Chinese symbol for “crisis” is the same as the one for “opportunity.” Even in difficult times there is hope for change and growth. The old “one door closes and another one opens” theory is useful at these times.

Thoreau said, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Go, Thoreau