Change is subtle: are you amazed at how different you are than your former self?

Other individuals and groups influence us; no one can change us. But we can change our own mind.

Yet outside forces can influence us so strongly that we willingly change our mind. What if you dislike--no, despise!--a certain vegetable? If I told you all of the health benefits about it, would you change your mind, would you eat it? Probably not. But what if the forces were so strong that you saw the vegetable differently? For instance, what if a natural disaster occurred and only those foods that you despise were available? As you became hungrier, your mind would likely adjust to think quite differently about those foods.

But how often do we have natural disasters or other major events that completely change our mind? Or how often do traumatic or highly influential experiences occur that make a dramatic shift occur so quickly?

How does change occur then?

For most of us, our mind changes or adjusts over long periods of time: small adjustments that we might not even realize at the time but that, over years, shape our perceptions of the world and the individuals in it.

What if we more deliberately tried to shift our mind: about food, about people, about life? What would it take, what could you do to live the life you desire for yourself? "The quiet of the listener makes room for the speech of others, like the quiet of the reader taking in words on the page, like the white of the paper taking ink." ~Rebecca Solnit in her book The Mother of All Questions. Read more about the book at Braingpickings.org.