I’m currently in the middle of a full scale clean-up of my office space as I get ready for 2013 and the next phase of my journey (more on that another time). One of the things that I have done over the past several years is collect various quotes and inspirational sayings on my office walls, as I come across them, so that I can reflect on their messages from time to time. So of course in my current clean-up phase I’ve pulled them all down and am busy packing them away with my other 2012 memorabilia. Here is one I wanted to share, as I find reviewing it always insightful — it is the “rules of the game of life” from a short book by Cherie Carter-Scott:
If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules
Rule One: You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.
Rule Two: You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called “life.” Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.
Rule Three: There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.
Rule Four: A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.
Rule Five: Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
Rule Six: “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here,” you will simply obtain a “there” that will look better to you than your present “here.”
Rule Seven: Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.
Rule Eight: What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.
Rule Nine: Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
Rule Ten: You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unraveling the double helix of inner knowing.
Up until Rule #10, it strikes me that this list is pretty straightforward and frankly, not really very controversial or spiritual. Rule Ten (to me, anyway) suggests some kind of reincarnation or renewal and reuse of the soul, which a lot of people might have trouble with. So if you are one of those, I suggest that rather discarding the whole thing as “new age “gobbledygook” you instead just forget the last rule and go with the first nine — all of which are absolutely applicable to our lives on earth as we know it and live it every day.
Now that you’ve had an opportunity to review the rules of the game, here’s to playing the game of life more successfully and fully in 2013 and beyond.
