Re-Vision a Relationship (Past, Present or Future)

For our final February weekly post about the Life Theme of RELATIONSHIPS, I invite you to consider how you might wish to have changed or to currently ‘tweak’ some aspect of a meaningful relationship in your life. With the divine gift of imagination, you are capable of effectively “re-visioning” your relationship events; past, present or future.

It may help first to consider if there is a PATTERN about some of your relationships that you would choose to alter if you could.  This is an active exercise; it is about what YOU CAN/ COULD have done differently–or would do differently today–that might have lead to some different results.  Re-visioning a past event or situation can have a profound influence on your current disposition when it comes to actions or decisions you could be contemplating now, so that you can avoid pitfalls of the past.

The strength of this exercise is that it brings your present awareness to bear either on a past situation or more mindfully upon a present set of circumstances.

So do this with full exercise of your (re-)constructive imagination. Once you have identified a pattern you would wish to change and you have remembered a particular moment in a particular relationship which itself you feel you might/’should’ have enacted differently in retrospect, imagine yourself IN THAT MOMENT again. This time, change  the conversation or the action knowingly, with the awareness you have since gained. Journal or internally dialogue with the other person in this relationship moment. Let him or her speak, and respond or initiate your own conversation as it could have been rather than as it was.  Listen to the other person and see that they listen to and hear you deeply.  Continue the scenario in your imagination until you bring it to a new level of resolution. As you emerge from your reverie, give yourself time to reflect on how the future might have been altered from this re-visioned exchange.

I find that when I do this re-vision the past technique–and I have often as a life mapping tool (see right panel)–it really feels as if not just the memory of the event but the actual event itself HAS CHANGED. I feel less attachment afterwards to the initial triggering moment and better equipped to approach any similar situation in the present or future.

I welcome YOUR Comments and Story!

Beatriz at Dinner: In Need of a Better Ending! (Health Theme)

Hi All. So I watched Beatriz at Dinner this week, expecting an excellent story with John Lithgow and Salma Hayak in the top roles. At first I was delighted and of course, the acting was superb by these two distinguished Thespians. But the ending…oh my! This story cries out (to me) for a Better Ending! And as the protagonist Beatriz, played intensely by Hayak, is a Healer from Mexico in the story, I want to rewrite the story to bring a more positive message to the Healer motif.

Beatriz is an intuitive healer and masseuse.  She is very—let’s say, overly—sensitive in the story to injury to any animals or humans. She can feel their pain to the point that she has become unbalanced by the cold reality of indifference. Doug, her nemesis as it plays out in the story (Lithgow’s role) is a financial developer mogul. He has succeeded often at the expense of wildlife or native occupations of land he has acquired to build his empire of hotels and other big developments. So, this becomes a story about class inequality and depicts a clash of viewpoints between Beatriz and Doug that gets magnified and intensified within Beatriz as she entertains the notion of murdering the wicked seeming mogul…

 I will not tell the story to its film conclusion here, so as not to be a spoiler. Let’s just say I found the current ending disturbing, as was intended.

I believe in Better Endings! To me that is a natural principle that gives anyone the creative license to change any story they wish (especially, their OWN!) So then, how would I personally rewrite the plotline development of Beatriz at Dinner?

I would start just after Beatriz has met Doug at her client’s high-class dinner party and (been) retired to her room. I would have her devise something magnificent, not destructive, to teach a vital, transformative lesson to Doug that might effectively alter his perceptions about his own empire and bring him to some possibly life changing (and life enhancing) transformative concepts that he can implement to benefit not just his own but everyone’s world.

Like in the wonderful film of Powder, first Beatriz can intuitively link Doug to sense the pain of the African rhinoceros he was so proud of hunting and killing. Let him feel that pain so he can commit to never hunting again and to supporting endangered animal programs with his wealth.  Then maybe Beatriz could also tap Doug in telepathically to the lives of some of the peoples his hotel projects have displaced or impoverished.  As Doug has been a TED talk speaker, let him change his tune, go spend some time in these native communities, and revise his approach to development, building compassion and opportunity for local people into his approach.

Maybe Doug and Beatriz, recognizing the kismet of their connecting at the dinner party, could eventually team up and she could help to lead him to use his money and power for the greater good! Maybe they receive a Nobel Peace Prize down the road for their beneficial collaboration.

images are from pixabay.com

Please note, Better Endering is not about better writing or about critiquing authors. It is about CREATIVE RE-VISIONING, a principle we can all apply to our own lives to manifest the higher, greater life potentials of our deepest imagining.

I welcome your insights and story!

Magical Creature Metaphors of Resurrection: Phoenix and Butterfly

“Up from the ashes” depicts the magical Phoenix bird that dies and is reborn from its own ashes, completing a cycle of birth-death-rebirth over and over again.  The magical Butterfly as well, though a real being, literally dies to its earth-crawling caterpillar form to be fully redesigned and reborn in the chrysalis, emerging as a beautiful, delicate winged being.

Being capable of flight in their mature form is a common denominator of the Phoenix and the Butterfly. As archetypal metaphors, they thereby represent the primordial IDEALIST in us all; we are each of us capable of essential transformations of our own form and/or consciousness. 

The Phoenix transforms from an AIR archetype into a FIRE archetype and then re-emerges as an AIR element archetype again. The Butterfly transforms from an EARTH element archetype to an AIR archetype form.  AIR as an archetypal element connotes liberation, spiritual freedom and a spirit of adventure. As such, the archetypal transformations of Phoenix and Butterfly are also ALCHEMICAL; they have a MYSTICAL  aspect of Ascension and Enlightenment.

images are from pixabay.com

When have YOU, or how MIGHT you, emulate the mystical Phoenix or Butterfly?

Reflecting on this question to provide an example from my own life, I can relate to the Phoenix metaphor in several aspects. I figuratively died to my early, formative life experience in New York state in 1979 to Go West, to Phoenix, to undergo the transformation of graduate school in a new career major, Anthropology. I might even say that then the later graduation from graduate school with my PhD and relocating to Colorado to conduct my career as a professor for the next 25 years was another Ascension, another death and rebirth so I could apply (give back to life) as a professor all I had been learning up til then. Now then, I have saved the Caterpillar to Butterfly metaphor for the next, huge transformation of my identity as I retire and relocate back to New York state this summer.  I will emerge from the chrysallis of Academe to a life of greater freedom and opportunity for creative expression as an Author, with my book, Your Life Path–see right panel–being published this March and at least two more in the Life Paths series to complete and publish after that.

I invite and welcome YOUR comments and Story!

Groundhog Day and The Razor’s Edge—Two Tales of Rebirth of the Hero

The film Groundhog Day provides a wonderful story about reincarnation though based on a fantastical “time loop effect” whereby the weatherman protagonist, Bill Murray’s Phil, recycles through the same day, a Groundhog Day in small town America.  This man who starts out this day as a crass, cynical boor of a person, learns through trial and resurrection—again and again, gradually—to reorder his priorities and strengthen his  Self. Phil transforms as does a caterpillar to a butterfly, shedding his old, earthbound self to emerge as a spiritually enlightened Being.

This story reminds me of another that Bill Murray also starred in a version of: Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, which is one of the greatest spiritual novels of all time. In The Razor’s Edge, a man, Larry Darrell,  disillusioned by classism, modern urban squalor and insincere human relations makes a personal pilgrimage to India, where he gains enlightenment and then returns to Chicago. Played originally by Tyrone Power in the 1946 film version of the story, Darrell’s (Power’s) eyes are blazing with the enlightenment or ‘holy fire’ he has gained after his Return, bringing the opportunity of mercy, growth and healing to his former fiancé and other ‘ugly American’ types.

So, resurrection and rebirth does not only apply to spiritual giants or exceptional Souls. Each of us, all of us—human and animals too—have the capacity for growth and learning, for trials and transformation of our life conditions and our very character. For it is character, not ego or personality, that we may aim to develop as we reflect deeply on our dispositions, forged through habit often, and make conscious choices to amend and improve our state.

Currently I am dealing with a diagnosis that my dear Soul friend, my dog-friend Sophia, is now diabetic. The doctor I have been led to promotes a healthful, radical change in Sophie’s diet, to virtually a vegetarian diet. This is hard for both myself—not a vegetarian—and for Sophie (but probably mainly hard for me to accept and fully administer). My goal of course is Sophie’s longevity and for her to beat this disease altogether.

Change is always challenging. But active change allows great opportunities for personal growth, spiritual advancement, and improvement.

images are from pixabay.com

What about you? What transformative change have you experienced or do you seek to undergo? Go for it!

I welcome YOUR comments and story!

Alchemical Pairing: Metaphor Plus Archetype

Life is a Golden Opportunity, as an envisioning metaphor, reminds me of the concept of Emptiness expressed in the Tao Te Ching:

Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching:  

  Thirty spokes unite at one hub to make a wheel, But what is missing makes it useful.

Clay is shaped into a bowl,
But it is the empty space that makes it useful.

Cut out doors and windows make a room,
But its empty space makes it useful.

So, what is there is beneficial –
But what is not there makes things useful.

From the unknown the known emerges; from an appreciation of infinite potential, all is possible.

So allow me to explain further what this new year at Life Paths for Better Endings aims to provide for you. Week One of every month I will present a positive Life Path Metaphor which we will explore and that you can contemplate in relation to your own life.  Week Two presents a relevant monthly Archetypal character image based on Dr. Charles Bebeau’s approach to archetypal psychology which he derived from Sumerian mythology and astrology.  Week Three–beginning in December–will invite you to combine the monthly Life Metaphor with the monthly archetype in such fashion as to consider how you can harness the character Strengths of this Archetypal Ally in realizing the positive potentials of the monthly Life Metaphor. At this stage you will be combining two “elements,” one conceptual/schematic (the affirmative Life Metaphor) and the other personal, based on the ‘personal unconscious’ architecture of your own Psyche in Carl Jung’s or James Hillman’s terms. Then, in Week Four every month, this blog will explore results from combining these elements, both in our own lives and in popular stories, mythology, or in the universe at large.

 

In other words, each month I will be inviting you to engage an alchemical sort of psychological pairing process, bringing positively oriented Life Metaphors into conjunction with Archetypal Ally energies to help you develop understandings about your own Better Endings potentials. So then, Life is a Golden Opportunity; it offers the opportunity to fashion something “golden” out of the raw materials of present conditions in relation to your goals and Dreams.

  

This monthly process was made more clear to me last Sunday night, while I was contemplating by using Life is a Golden Opportunity as a mantra in relation to my own life. Knowing that the November archetype I will be presenting for you next week is The Descender, I asked inwardly of my own inner guidance to be shown how my own Descender energy might align with this month’s Golden Opportunity metaphor. In my dreaming that night I was shown how the most deeply challenging situations and relationships in my life have offered the greatest opportunities for learning and for personal growth or development. Rather than avoiding those situations that tend to bring out ‘the worst’ in myself or in others I am placed in association with, if I embrace the opportunity for growth and new awareness, I can change how I deal with such situations and TRANSFORM the conditions underlying that situation altogether.

To be clearer with you about what my dream revealed, it showed me seated between two people who are so different in outlook and personality from me that we have generally irritated one another to such an extent that for over 15-20 years we have chosen to simply avoid one another altogether, “giving space.” No overt problem due to our avoidance, but in my dream I came to understand that these few uncomfortable relationships are spiritually neither accidental nor meaningless. Being positioned in relation to people with extremely opposing philosophical or theoretical outlooks on life offers me a tremendously “golden opportunity.” If I can transform these relationships, by expressing an authentic, genuine interest in these persons’ outlooks and sharing openly from my own for them, we could all potentially reach a higher state of ‘balance;’ see?  By combining disparate elements–viewpoints in this case–in new ways, the opportunity for genuine growth in my own outlook is possible. I can free myself from an attachment to a narrower outlook by opening to the ‘antithetical’ expression of a counter-perspective, arriving at a new order of Synthesis.  This can induce a metaphorically alchemical sort of psychological transformation! My Descender is a part of me that avoids conflicting relationships, rather than confronting or embracing them.  But now, I can be more open to changing these relations, to ACCEPTING the golden opportunities they offer.

 

Next then, this Sunday, I will introduce The Descender to you! Meanwhile, I invite you to continue to ponder about how Life is YOUR Golden Opportunity, day by day, moment by moment, with every situation and relationship you encounter.

I invite and will share each of your insights, comments, and stories.

 

There Is No Box! A Concept I Live By, by Denise Naughton

Dear readers: Thank you for your patience during a month of Best of Better Endings, while I am finalizing a major project that you will hear about soon. Meanwhile, though, I am re-blogging los=ts i=of the early posts that most readers haven’t seen anyway. Today’s Best of Better Endings is by Denise naughton, whose principle of “There is No Box!” is one I often go back to whenever I begin to think too rigidly. As a Better Endings principle, “There is NO BOX” is a tool for expanding your approach to any situation and opening to greater flexibility… – Linda

A few years ago a friend of mine, Jay, and I were putting together a talk about some ‘spiritual laws of life’. In order to do the talk well, we decided we should experience at least one of the laws we would talk about very consciously by working with them inwardly. Both of us chose two laws and began doing the work. My two spiritual laws were the ‘law of imperfection’, and the ‘law of progressive continuation’. Both of these principles were in harmony with one another because both imply there is always another step to take—which can be frustrating in one way, but so freeing in another.

Of course we all want a rest, but that rest is always up to us. Let’s say I’ve climbed this mountain, and I’m sitting on the peak to enjoy the accomplishment and the view—literally and metaphorically. Though I’ve never climbed mountains, my brother does, and I’ve read his stories.  The reality is, one can’t sit on the peak for too long—the lack of oxygen, weather moving in, or the need to get off that peak to move on to the next one propels your journey onward.

My grandmother used to say to me that she’d never been bored a day in her life, and she said that almost to the day she passed away. The first time I heard her say that, I decided I would never be bored either. However, I’ve always felt that a constant striving for something better also becomes boring. It can become a sense of restlessness without contentment, without loving the moment of accomplishment.  If I’m always looking outward, then I’m not developing inwardly, and that’s where the real relationship with life begins.

With this workshop, Jay and I wanted to each share a personal statement that came from our deep understanding of the spiritual laws we had been working with. My friend’s statement was that, “Each doorway brings me into a higher state of consciousness.”  I, on the other hand, wasn’t getting anything that excited me, though I could hear the excitement in Jay’s voice over his phrase. It made life sing for him.

How the image of a box came to mind I really don’t remember. I thought about the phrase ‘thinking outside of the box’ as being relevant to the laws of imperfection and progressive continuation, but that phrase bothered me. Somehow it was still a form of containment. Then I realized that what I was aiming for had nothing to do with thinking. It had everything to do with being, which can only be experienced inwardly by the individual, so that even writing about it takes away from the sensation.

Jay and I talked about my dilemma over the phone, and he said he knew without a doubt that I would find the right phrase. I hung up with huge doubts, and walked into another room. In that moment I said, “There is no box,” and with those words my world changed. I actually felt everything line up for me inwardly and suddenly I was standing at the edge of a new world filled with brilliant light and a sound current that I cannot describe. I knew I had found the right phrase. Where else this phrase would take me I didn’t know, but I was ready for the adventure.

I did a great deal of work with that phrase, “There is no box”.  I created workshop exercises around it, and I took it into a daily contemplation. Where it took me initially was turning a talk into a workshop, and with my personal experience and Jay’s we were able to work with other people, helping them to develop their own personal phrase that came from deeply contemplating upon spiritual laws they chose to work with. After doing the workshop three times in Colorado, we were invited to Australia to share it there too, and we received many compliments on how this workshop helped people to move forward in their own quest to take another step.

What I love most about this story is that ever so often someone will come up to me now and say, “There is no box!” Usually it’s when I’ve boxed myself in with fear, and doubt, or an image of what I think something should be rather than what it can be. Having no box takes away limitations and brings nothing but possibilities.

Denise Naughton is an author, a public speaker, and an ABD Ph.D. Candidate at Union College. She is completing her dissertation on Jungian archetypes related to stock characters in Australian film.

Related articles

• Spiritual Laws of Success – Intention (hunt4truth.wordpress.com)

“The Prologue to Compassion”, by Joshua Bertetta

Best contributed Story of the Week (for A Month of the Best of Better Endings)

March 22, 2014

 

It commenced with an inconsiderable light, an untinged light

It was perhaps part of what was, and what was was only black.

The light was with the black you see, and the light was the black.

And through this light that was the black and with the black, things came to be.

A light breeze scattered flecks of this light. A brief pause let the flecks settle and the wind returned to the inconsiderable light, only to pause again and again go forth to scatter flecks of light. And bit by bit this helpful little laawan broadcasted the light across the black. Bit by bit, the specks sprouted and in spouting, grew a little more with each breeze and each breeze, bit by little bit, continued depositing the little specks of light. Back and forth, back and forth, the busy little wind worked tirelessly, without haste, never whining, though it seemed its task would never cease.

Now as this little wind busied itself, “things” took “shape.” It wasn’t so much that things themselves were made per se, but something more akin to the idea of things took shape, for still, these “things” remained unlit. Until, that is, the wind draped color over the ideas, thus bestowing upon them their shapes. These were not your ordinary run of the mill colors, however, for the breeze did not bother itself with the blues and the reds and the yellows and the greens: no, it beheld the illuminateds and the lucents, the prismatics and iridiants, the opaques and the opalines.

Such provided the environment for the makings of things and things thus did form. First the dragonfly, then the flowers for the dragonfly, the grasses for the flowers, and the ground for the grasses. The water and the air. All pouring their colors and their shapes in tandem with the swashing wind. Hills unrolled in the distance, and trees.

Everything created in and by the light that was the dark and was with the dark.

Flowers giggled diamonds; the diamonds sirulated into butterflies and those butterflies, those luxuriant and splashy butterflies, dripped polygonal pollens and gave lines to birds.

Soften its features did the wind with its gentle comings and goings. This wind, this breath, this breath, just breathe, just breathe, just breathe.

And in that just-breathing did the breath find life; in finding life did the breath find flesh and in finding flesh the breath found itself, fulgurating, reflected in and by the light itself—the light that was the water, that was the ground, the dragonflies and butterflies, the fish, and all the flowers—all of it, every single little speck of it, the light that was the black and was with the black.

What it was it just was and in being was, it kept on being. Being what it was…what it was…it was is. It is what is. Being. Am. What was was was. What is is. What am.

The wind: Be.

The light: Am.

Being and am-ing, am-ing and being; so the wind, the breath, the breath moving in, the breath moving out, passing in, passing out, the breath that am the flowers and the fish, the butterflies and the dragonflies, the ground, the water, the light itself finding itself in the flesh finding itself in the breath, in am.

And thus began the knowing and with the knowing the naming and the first name was the wind’s name:

Rahim.

Bio: An aspiring novelist, Joshua Bertetta holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute and teaches in the Religious Studies Department at St. Edward’s University. He lives in Austin, TX with his wife and three boys, and he has a facebook group dedicated to his work at http://www.facebook.com/storyofthefour. Contact info: joshuabertetta8306@gmail.com

(There were 14 Likes for the first publication of this story on Better Endings!)

The Road to Sedona– A Transformational Travel Tale

“A Going and a Return”… such is the ‘heroic adventure journey’ potential in all travel.

I have certainly experienced many times feeling that I am a different person before and after a significant travel adventure has occurred.

Some years ago I took a road trip with a friend, from Buffalo, New York to Arizona. I was scouting out whether I might wish to move to Arizona to continue graduate studies; which, largely from this experience, I did! I travelled with an older lady friend from my spiritual group, Grace. In addition to aiming to visit Arizona State University—where later I attended grad school for 14 years—we wanted to visit Sedona, rather as a metaphorical pilgrimage at the time (1978).

In Effingham, Illinois, the Greyhound bus we were on broke down. Half the passengers shifted to another bus that would bypass Sedona, but we waited for one that would let us actually switch to a Trailways bus that would go right through the heart of Sedona. I met at this point a woman, Toni, who was on the same bus with her grandmother. We became immediate though temporary friends as kindred souls, our group of four forming a friendly set.

On the road to Sedona,

Where all is Sadhana…

(chorus from a song that expanded throughout the cross-country bus trip)

In Albuquerque a major drama began.  After a break stop, we were to be leaving on the last Greyhound out of Albuquerque that night, around midnight. Grace met a woman who introduced herself as a police woman and said she was trying to apprehend a murderer trying to get out of New Mexico! She showed Grace her badge and me too, when Grace introduced me to her. As we went to get back on the bus, two men who had not purchased tickets at the normal ticketing window gave cash to the bus driver and got onto the bus. One of them, with a recently shaved head, sat in the front seat right in front of me and Grace. He draped a serape with a metallic bulge in its pocket over his seat, resting his head on the bulge. Then he slowly pulled out a cigarette (illegal in the 1^st several rows of seats then), stared toward the bus driver, and muttered, “Goodbye New Mexico, forever!” The other man sat kitty-corner behind us on the other side of the bus, holding tightly to a paper bag.

This man met the description the police woman had shared with Grace, so she got off the bus to tell the lady about him. She came back saying the police woman was afraid to act because of all the other passengers. I got off and also tried to convince the police woman that this man fit her description. She said,” You’d better just get back on the bus.” As I did so, the bus driver gave me a look of warning, like “Don’t make waves.”

So the bus got rolling again and I turned around and whispered my suspicions about this man to Toni, who had been our major organizer when the bus had broken down in Illinois. Toni sent the message by relay whispers throughout the entire bus, until it reached the other man across and behind from us. Suddenly he started rustling that brown bag loudly, and coughing, to get the man we suspected’s attention. I was afraid then that I had jeopardized everyone on the bus, so I became very hyper-alert.

At a Winslow, AZ wayside café stop, the man with the bag stayed close to my and Toni’s group, sitting near enough to listen in on our conversation. Meanwhile Lurch (my name by then for the murder-suspect from the frontseat) never came into the café at all. He paced outside and at one point he turned to put his face—nose pressed!—up against the glass window to stare us down. Back onto the bus, and again a–this time–rather scared look of caution from the bus driver.

The next three hours I will never forget. It was around 2-5:30 AM on the bus. For fear that I had possibly endangered the passengers, I entered into one of the deepest contemplation/meditative experiences of my life. I sang a spiritual word and focused inwardly on connecting with inner guidance and illuminating the situation. Then something weird occurred. Around 5 or so, other passengers apparently started perceiving the possible threat as a joke. There was audible talk around the bus about “who was going to be the 1^st person taken to the back lavatory on the bus and shot!” This was surreal conversation to me, as I continued to contemplate deeply. Something then changed in me; my state of consciousness shifted. I opened my eyes around 5:30 and looked out at the desert as we were approaching Flagstaff, with the sacred San Franscisco Peaks just ahead to our West. I said to Toni, “You know, people think that the Desert is dead and barren, but it isn’t. Look! It is teeming with Life!”

Lurch then audibly groaned. He turned his head slowly around and locked his sallow eyes onto mine; then he uttered slowly, “So, … how do you feel … about YOUR Life?”

Because my deep contemplation had brought me to a heightened level of consciousness, I simply beamed back at Lurch, held his gaze and answered brightly, “Hi! How Are You!” Lurch groaned again and turned to place his head back onto that metallic bulge in his serape pocket.

When we reached the Flagstaff bus station, Lurch and his friend got off, Lurch saying once again, “Goodbye, New Mexico, Forever!” I was ready to propel myself out ahead of him to get security if he would have tried anything on his way out. But we never saw him again.

We switched to a Trailways bus that took us for a touring route through Sedona. Once we rounded the bend opening onto the Red Rock majesty of Sedona in Oak Creek Canyon, Language left me. I couldn’t speak, as if to utter a word to categorize a ‘mountain’ or ‘red sand’ would be to sever it from the WHOLE that this space and everything within it and around it, IS. Later I would understand this was a cosmic consciousness experience.  Toni said, “It’s like Love; It cannot be contained.” She got it; I was speechless.

Here’s the poem from that day when I discovered a special Eagles’ Nest spot (as I call it) overlooking the canyon:

The Canyon

It is drawing me into Its depths

and will contain me,

Yet in that instant It shall free me

until me-ness dissolves beyond

eternity,

Where Just IS-ness

is

******   ******

Have you had a transformational travel experience? I invite you to share your insights and stories!

TUNING IN

Tuesdays are Prompts days at Better Endings, relating to our weekly theme, which this week is television Better Endings.  I’ll list some topics you might write or talk about, or share your Comments or stories about, in relation to the Better Endings concept. Is there a TV series you’ve always wished would have ended differently, especially one you felt personally invested in while the series was on the air?  Or, is there a specific episode of a favorite television program you would love to see a Better Ending for?

I’ll list some possible topics for creative re-scripting in a bit. But overnight while I was contemplating this theme, I realized how television as an expressive MEDIUM is a blank canvas for the imagination to project upon. To me, much of contemporary TV fare is vacuous, little more than comic or dramatic drivel based on overused characters and tedious plots. Maybe that reveals my age (59), showing I am jaded about contemporary TV situational comedy and drama. I grew up with the original Star Trek and heady fare like Mission Impossible, The Prisoner , The Avengers and Dr. No; plus raucous, 60’s-70’s ‘revolutionary’ romps including Laugh-In, The Love Boat, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, all of which presented a ‘new’ world of magical-thinking possibilities and romantic license. But closer to my point: If you think of television as a blank canvas, what would you really LIKE TO SEE projected there?

Last night I envisioned a Reality program that would be somewhat of a cross between TED Talks and How It’s Made.  A challenging global issue, like World Hunger, would be given to a Think Tank assembly of inventors, political savants, natural scientists and social scientists, and engineers from relevant fields, with a global audience free to call in with their ideas, too. The program would stay on that challenging issue, inviting pertinent policy makers and politicians as needed, for as long as the assembly took to arrive at practical solutions and then to actually IMPLEMENT them, at least on a small scale that could then realistically be expanded to a whole scale transformation. What a concept! Middle East peace, asteroid deflection, fresh water sustainability, free and renewable energy with non-harmful means of extraction and generation, etcetera…now, there’s a TV program I would tune into! (Are there any producers or screenwriters out there?) Why COULDN’T we use television or other worldwide information media to arrive at win-win situations to global problems as a collective, species wide think tank?

Okay now, let me rein this in some. Here’s a list of possible ‘prompt’ topics to apply Better Endings to regarding television.  Feel free to Comment with your own ideas:

• Family situational comedies
• Crime dramas
• Science documentaries
• The composition of ensemble casts (who would combine well, for what kinds of programs?)
• Memorable series endings re-writes (e.g. Friends, Seinfeld, the Mary Tyler Moore show, Lost, All in the Family)
• Projected ‘good’ endings of current series
• Day-TV soap operas
• Sci-fi drama series
• Documentary series
• Reality TV

If you think of a good “through-line” (that is, a one sentence zinger that describes a fully envisioned episode or series concept), please send it to share! The sky’s the limit…well actually, not even!

Thanks for stopping by. And always, Better Endings to You! – Linda

Free Yourself! Write a Better Ending

“So we beat on,
boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly
into the Past.”
F.Scott Fitzgerald

This final line from The Great Gatsby, so recently reprised for us, was my tagline for many years of this life.  I felt so much more alive in some specific memories from my late teenage years that nothing in the Present could ever measure up. This has changed for me, I realize, over the past few years, but why?  As I have developed the approach to personal life reflection and future prospection which I call the Life Maps Process, I have piloted every step before applying it with others.  One of these techniques is called Re-Vision a Past Transition.  (One of our weekly topics will allow you to practice this in your own way, if you like.)  I revisited a traumatic moment with my father when I was 17. I journaled in first person, present tense, writing  a dialogue between me and my Dad as if it had occurred the day after he had unleashed his raging temper against me when I simply had tried to defend my brother about something at the dinner table.

The words don’t matter here. But the exchange between my memory of my father at that time and my today-self that could engage with him without fear or the hurt and anger I felt then was transformative. We got to say to each other things we really might have said, apart from the heat of the moment. He got to hear my pain; I got to hear his frustration about a teen-aged daughter in the late 1960’s who was headstrong and, in his belief, needing to be tamed to prevent hard knocks in “the real world” (his view) down the road.

This conversation that I journaled with my father is as real–perhaps more because I directly engaged instead of shrinking from the immediate moment–as the actual scene that had occurred so many years ago.  It has deeply revised my “memory” construction of the event.  This sort of re-visioning, I feel deeply, freed me forever from that interaction with my Dad that had scarred me for years.  I cannot remember back to that event without remembering the coming to terms we experienced in our ‘later’ dialogue.

From freeing myself of this “stuck” memory, I seem to have released myself in general from “living in the past” altogther, even freeing myself from being ‘bound’ to those positive experiences I was so holding onto.  Now that I see that memories are not necessarily fixed or frozen ‘in time’, I am free to be more flexible in the Present. Again then, past-present-future are entangled; you can’t change one without affecting them all.

And so, another form of Better Endings.

I know some of you are writing your historical rewrite and I hope to see your stories in my email!  Feel free to send Comments too!

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• 10 Ways Journaling Can Improve Your Life (lifehack.org)