Are You Waiting for Opportunity or Creating It?

Yesterday morning I wandered into the woods behind my house to spend some time in meditation and in communion with Mother Nature. When sitting in a natural environment, I often find myself taking in, in quiet awe, what is taking place around me. Yesterday was no exception.

As I sat in meditation I was surrounded by the sound of the tap-tap-tapping on the trees by the many woodpeckers that call my little expanse of property their home. I experienced it like one would a symphony. When I finished my mediation, I became intent on finding and watching the woodpeckers at work.

I spotted a male and female together on a tree. This doesn't happen often, I usually see one at a time. I became mesmerized by the focus and intensity of their search for food.

I am not sure how long I sat watching them. There was a point in my watching that the phrase "when opportunity knocks, answer the door" came to my mind.

As I contemplated this, I noticed that the woodpeckers weren't waiting for their opportunity to eat by sitting on the side of the tree and hoping their food would come to them. They were actively and energetically engaged in seeking their food and removing the barriers (the bark of the tree) that kept them from getting it.

I laughed out loud when their endeavors resulted in success, and they quickly (and with what seemed like joy to me) gulped down whatever little morsel of food they had just uncovered.

That one success didn't stop them, however. They ate their morsel, and they went right back to work. There was this beautiful cycle of tap-tap-tapping, uncovering a morsel of food, enjoying the bliss of their meal, and then back to the tap-tap-tapping.

I could have stayed and watched this cycle all day. Alas, I had a 9 AM conference call for work that needed attending to, so off I went.

I left feeling wonderfully enriched by the lessons that I took away from my beautiful encounter with the woodpeckers.

You see, they reminded me that we have some choices in this life we are living:

We can wait for opportunity to arrive, or we can create it.
We can allow obstacles to stop us from achieving our successes, or we can challenge the obstacles by creating ways around or through them.
We can play the victim story out by creating a laundry list of excuses about why we don't have the life we want as we sit back and let life "happen" to us, or we can take full responsibility and move into action to create our lives to look and feel exactly how we would like.

If you agree that these are choices, what do you choose in this moment?

If you would like someone to champion your efforts around