We often hear about how things come in three’s. This is often used as a way of holding on to a pessimistic view on life. One person that we know dies. Then the father of a friend dies. We suddenly think “Oh oh! Things come in three’s you know!” Then, two months later, someone we have only met on social media is killed in a car crash. “Bam! I told you! Things come in three’s!”
I know that I should not have to say this, but….THIS IS RIDICULOUS!!!!
Yes, there are things that will happen that we notice that seem to be in sets of three. Usually it is fairly close together. For example, I tend to pay attention when I hear about someone people think I should meet. Usually it will happen once or twice and I will then have that on my radar. By the third time, it is usually because someone is now introducing me to that person. So yes, a set of three.
How people rely on the sets of three is what concerns me. What concerns me about it is that people are actually making themselves have to rely on the hearing something or experiencing something three times BEFORE they will acknowledge and PAY ATTENTION. How well would that work with stop signs? How well would that work if someone is telling us, “No. Please stop”? Why does something have to be repeated? And what about the other fifteen times that it was presented and we did not pay attention at all to those either? Are we, as humans, really that clueless??
No. We are not. But what we are is lazy. Yes. That’s right. I said it. Humans are lazy. We tend to want to have the easy way through life. This means that we bob around like inflated balls on a lake and think that “Lalalala…things are all just splendid.” We have no self-control and are completely dependent upon which way the wind blows. That is no way to live life.
We need to be able to take charge of our lives. We need to be able to stop blaming others for our failures and only taking credit for our successes. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that, “Yes, ten years ago I was stupid and immature and thought this….and now I have learned that I am the only common denominator in my screw ups.” Yes, some things are out of our control. And yes, sometimes the world is filled with chaos. The thing is that there are still, amidst all of that, ways in which we can take control of the things over which we do have influence. We just need to find what it is that we can take charge of and then DO IT.
I remember growing up in small town Saskatchewan, where the most common attitude was the one of the lowest common denominator. I knew there had to be more to life than that. But what did it look like? In an environment like that it is considered arrogant to want to excel. It is ridiculed when you focus on learning and advancing in education, instead of just watching sports, drinking beer and copulating with whomever is available. I knew I had to “get out of Dodge”. So I applied to go to university. I was surprised that I actually got in. I did not think that my marks in school would be good enough. But they were. Yes, I had to get student loans. Yes, I had to move to a city I was not familiar with. Yes, I had anxiety about pretty much everything for the first year. But I also knew that if I was ever going to actually make anything of myself I had to stick to it. So I worked hard and I got through. You can probably tell from my writing that I majored in English. At least, you can tell that I am an old school English major. The new English majors don’t seem to be able to form proper sentence structure or know grammar from a hole in the ground. Things have gotten really slack at the university level. I believe our entire society is going to suffer for that….HARD. But back to the topic at hand.
It did not take me three times to know that I needed to “get out of Dodge”. I knew this by the time I was five years old. It just took a long time for me to be able to do so. But I knew that I had to because I was paying attention. And we, as humans, need to train ourselves to pay attention. This ability to pay attention is what makes me as astute as I am as a counsellor/shaman. It is not just reading body language and facial expressions. It is also about hearing what is NOT spoken. It is about listening to the communication that happens in between everything that is said or done. Paying attention is what is involved in being attentive. I attend to my life. I notice things that I am told most people miss. It is not that I am gifted in that regard. It is that I am not so self-absorbed and lazy towards life that I miss the stuff that makes the story more full. It is not just me doing this. Many people are good at it, but, truthfully, most people just don’t care about life and those around them enough to put the work in. They would rather have their eyes glued to the t.v. screen or the computer screen or the cell phone screen. A bomb could go off a block away and they would not even notice. A person could be drowning and they would not notice. The world could be falling apart around them and they would not notice. This, to me, is sad and is just one part of what makes me think to myself, “Self,” I say (because my self’s name is Self), “I think next time I incarnate, we should consider doing so in a world that is not so full of distractions and self-absorbed masses.” And my self usually agrees. In fact, it replies to me, “You know, Deerhorn,” (because it refers to me by name), “This has been going on for a long time. You saw this way back when you were eight years old. You did not need it to be presented to you three times in order to notice.” And I have to agree. So I nod my head.
So next time you are thinking to yourself, “Ah…yes….things happen in three’s” perhaps it would also be wise to ask yourself, “Why did I not pay attention to the other fifteen indicators?” Then think about what those were. Over time, you will get very skilled at foresight instead of just hindsight.