Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. – Cervantes, Don Quixote

One of the great lessons of life, one that takes some of us, including yours truly, many years to grasp, is not to force things. Sometimes you must let matters run their course. Sometimes you must take advantage of what nature and circumstance put in front of you.

I had an excellent example of that this past weekend. Some might recall that I live in Colorado and in 2014 I was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for the United States Senate. I received 52,000 votes, the most ever for a third-party candidate in a Colorado US Senate election. Not too bad. I enjoyed the experience so much I was a candidate for the same nomination this year, along with another lady.

The vote wasn’t particularly close, but she did not earn enough votes to claim the nomination outright. I earned enough to force a primary election in June.

I had suspected this might happen. My opponent grew up in Communist China and is a great friend of liberty and I knew as soon as she announced I had an uphill fight. I also determined I wanted to be on the ballot this November, so I decided to withdraw from the US Senate race, if I was nominated to run for the House of Representatives in District 3.

This was not the most difficult nomination to get in the history of politics. Nobody else had announced for it and I was nominated by acclimation. I then withdrew from the US Senate race.

I didn’t have to. As noted, I greatly enjoy running for the United States Senate and I could have accepted the primary. However, I might not have won the primary.

Fortune is guiding our affairs…

OK, the House of Representatives is not as prestigious as the US Senate, but I know from experience the US Senate is a tough nut to crack for a third-party candidate. A House race will be somewhat easier to make a difference in. I have contacts in the district and I have experience I didn’t have two years ago.

We must not fight the natural order. If we put it to work for us, the results might surprise us.

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Life is being on the wire; everything else is just waiting. – Rick Wallenda

Rick Wallenda is a tightrope walker, part of the family known as the Flying Wallenda’s. This quote came after Rick completed the same tightrope walk that had killed his grandfather, Karl.

Life is being on the wire…

We talk a lot here about finding what we were meant to do with our lives and doing it. The Wallendas were meant to walk on tightropes for the amusement of their fellow humans so they do it. They’ve been at it for four generations now.

Not everyone one walks on tightropes, however everyday life will, from time to time, offer plenty of figurative wires for us to walk on. Usually, these will be opportunities to exceed what we’ve done in the past, to do more than what we thought we were capable of. Some avoid these opportunities because they are afraid of not being up to the challenge and some are afraid they will be up to the challenge. Novitiates may not be ready to meet this challenge.

We must seize these opportunities, however, because while few of us are tightrope walkers, these are our wires and we must walk on them every time they present themselves because our lives have been spent preparing for these.

Everything else has been waiting…

The only way we will advance, both individually and collectively, is to walk on the wire. Sometimes we might fall, but you will be surprised the number of times we make it across.

Now, we cannot be on the wire all the time. That is not the way life is lived. But when it is time to hop on the wire, we must do so.

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…she was saved by the native shrewdness that goes hand in hand with personal ambition. – Ursula Curtiss, Letter of Intent

Ursula Curtiss was an American writer, usually of mystery stories, one our favorite genres. This book was about a one-time housekeeper who manages to work her way up the social ladder. The native shrewdness Ms Curtiss writes about comes in handy when her plans to marry well come perilously close to being ruined.

Perhaps intrigue isn’t the best context in which to discuss this, but the quote is applicable to everyday life as well. All of us have it inside us to find the native shrewdness that goes hand in hand with personal ambition.

We talk a lot in this space about making your time serve you and following the path you were meant to take while on this planet. When a person is doing this he or she finds the native shrewdness Ms Curtiss talks about because once you are committed to making your time serve you, your life is on auto-pilot. Your instincts will keep you on your path and will tell you when you’re not on your path.

This happens to me as a writer from time to time, usually when I committed to doing something and it was a time I really should’ve been behind a keyboard. In these instances there is something inside that says I am off-kilter, that I should be doing something else and it doesn’t go away until I am doing something else.  Once you’ve committed yourself to a goal, nature takes over and provides the focus required. It’s when we are doing things we really weren’t meant to be doing that we are disinterested and get distracted easily and end up living lives that are unfulfilling.

…by the native shrewdness that goes hand in hand with personal ambition.

Native shrewdness, the auto-pilot that will take you to where you are supposed to go in this life, is there for everyone willing to follow their heart and trust their instincts. Our hearts will tell us where we want to go. Our instincts with show us how to get there.

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