I hear the words chime in my mind ‘Opportunity favours the prepared mind’. Is my mind prepared and how is this level of mindful preparation affecting how I perceive the road ahead. Do I accept change or at least in my own mind stay where I am?

There’s the first concern, as life by its very nature is impermanent. We are all continually changing and so are the conditions that frame our future path. The arrow of time and entropy do not falter in their forward journey to a place that none of us has the capacity to fully know. Our knowledge horizon is as a general rule relatively static although it ebbs and wanes through life as our vantage point alters.

Stop for a short while and contemplate what you are feeling, what your mood is and how you are likely to react to a situation or opportunity that makes itself felt. These are wise words that I thought I’d have a go at analyzing.

Many people are bobbing along on the surface of economic life and this in itself elicits a certain thought process around the emotion ‘fear of an unknown future’. Shall I get another job that is better paid because lets face it I have the skills and experience. Others tell me that I’m good at what I do. So there’s the first emotion kicking in ‘ego’. I need some reassurance of my own abilities before I can even contemplate moving between jobs. Again, in short sequence, another emotion coming to the fore in the form of ‘fear’ and I need to offset this ‘known unknown’ with a fair amount of ‘known known’ emotional currency. I need to narrow the odds a bit in order to lessen the fear factor that rages.

Then another responses kicks in ‘greed’. I attempt to convince myself that if I get a really big wage rise on moving jobs this financial carrot will place ‘fear’ in soft focus and allow my acquisitive mind to rule the day. In emotional accounting terms ‘greed’ has canceled out ‘fear’ or at least lessened its impact and along with the more self preserving ‘ego’ response the variance has become more favorable.

But then concern raises its head as I feel a certain comfort in the familiarity that I feel for my current circumstances. I know what to expect and have won enough work battles and built up sufficient respect to be able to predict future outcomes. Maslow’s five-stage hierarchy of needs springs to mind:

Physiologically I’m well feed and have a roof over my head. I have ‘fear’ of loosing my job where I currently am in employment so that coincides with the safety element above. But no one to my knowledge is threatening my very existence unless of course today really is the end of the world as predicted by the Mayans. Or maybe this is the beginning of the end and a triple dip recession will kick in as a result of the fiscal cliff being reach and we will subsequently tumbled over it.

I’m negotiating hard with my own consciousness in order to accept impermanence as the natural order of things. The battle is being won and I’m working through the five stages to the inevitable acceptance of change. First there was ‘Denial’ that I had to confront any issue at all; then there was ‘Anger’ that I was being forced into making a change; I then ‘Bargained’ with myself hoping that the problem would simply go away; then a rather small amount of ‘Depression’ hit this forward moving emotional process and finally I ‘Accepted’ the inevitable, ‘Change happens’ and as a wise person suggested in response to a comment on another blog http://www.1earthnow.wordpress.com, “Get out of your head and follow your heart, experience the truth for yourself”. I’m guessing what she was saying in part was stop over thinking and just go with the flow.

Try to be mindful. Note the emotions as they arise, shake their proverbial hand and then cast them aside having noted there effects.