How many brushstrokes does it take to paint a new reality?

Millions Brushstrokes, That’s How Many.

Something really caught my attention recently. I noticed how projects, goals, and even major changes in our lives are made up of a million little things.

We tend to look at the finished creation. A book, a painting, a successful career, or a completely different way of living. Even when we recognize that changes are needed, we imagine enormous undertakings rather than multiple small actions.

Perhaps that’s why we so often never arrive at that vision.

A finished creation isn’t one thing. It’s a million little things that have quietly become one.

And I’ve been wondering whether the same is true of the realities we experience.

How Little Things Become Big Things

I’ve been seeing this everywhere.

When I’m writing a novel, there’s a scene here, a conversation there, a character revealing something unexpected, and a detail that suddenly becomes important three chapters later. Then one day, there’s a finished book.

Music is much the same. I might spend an hour adjusting a few seconds of a song. A word here, a note there, an instrument amplified, or made quieter. A day or two later, the finished piece can touch the soul.

Even preparing a fishing boat works this way.

Recently, I watched Larry putting together chain anchors for his fishing boat. One seemingly simple job involved finding materials, measuring, cutting, fitting, adjusting and checking everything. Twenty little tasks, each taking perhaps ten minutes.

Before you know it, the day is gone. Yet the boat is that much closer to being ready for fishing.

In the Communication Network of Reality (CNOR) research practicum, we’re exploring something similar, but applied to how we participate in reality.

Over ten weeks, participants examine familiar assumptions, habitual responses and the discourses they engage in. Then they begin making small changes and observing what happens.

One exercise might involve looking at forty ordinary items from three different perspectives, spending ten minutes on each.

That’s nearly seven hours exploring perspectives!

The individual actions can seem almost insignificant. A different response. A question we haven’t asked before. An assumption we stop carrying.

But what happens when we change hundreds or thousands of these little things?

Becoming Compatible With a Different Reality

Imagine you want to become a painter.

You love painting, but there are no paints in your house, no brushes, nowhere to work and no time set aside for it.

You may want that reality very much, but your present life isn’t compatible with it.

Now imagine you buy a paintbrush.

You haven’t painted anything, but something has changed. There’s now a paintbrush in your reality.

Tomorrow, perhaps you buy paints. Next week, you clear a little space. Then you pick up a canvas and spend fifteen minutes following an online painting lesson.

At what point does the reality of being a painter begin?

When you finish your first painting? When someone buys one? Or did something change the moment you bought that brush?

At what point did the wish become a reality?

And perhaps, somewhere along the way, your identity changes too. You stop thinking of yourself as someone who wants to paint and begin experiencing yourself as someone who paints.

Not because you declared it, but because your daily life has become compatible with it. Because there have been millions of brushstrokes between “want” and “to paint.”

A Silver Outfit and a Glimpse of the Future

A couple of weeks back, I bought some clothes that reflected my chosen future as a famous artist.

Why those particular clothes?

Because of a dream.

In the dream, I was wearing a distinctive shiny silver and gray outfit as I walked to a control panel for a music show in an arena filled with thousands of people.

I intend to have that outfit recreated by a seamstress someday. Meanwhile, I went online and found a sparkly silver sequin top. Not quite the outfit from the dream, but silver, gray and shiny enough to begin with.

One tiny physical action compatible with my chosen reality. To clarify, I do not usually wear sequin, and definitely not silver gray clothes.

When the top arrived, I wore it with a nice blazer, fitted trousers and boots to work. I felt comfortable and, well, pretty.

Then Larry looked at me.

To my surprise, reality seemed to crack open into my chosen path at that moment. Time and space appeared to warp, and our realities wobbled, shook, split, then combined and settled in our chests.

It was remarkable.

One small action, followed by an experience far larger than the action itself.

And it involved another person.

How mysterious it is that reality co-creations sometimes don’t solidify until influential and powerful co-creators join us.

It makes me wonder what happens when we change our participation in multiple little ways, and the people around us begin responding to those tiny changes.

Which Little Things Will You Change?

Here’s something else I’ve noticed.

We’re already performing millions of little actions every year that maintain our present reality.

We get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, answer messages, do our work, speak to people, make decisions and go to bed. So much of this happens automatically, following familiar patterns.

What if, instead of trying to make one enormous change, we began changing those patterns?

A different word. A different response. A new way of spending ten minutes. A silver sequin top.

We don’t necessarily need to add a million new things to our lives. We can begin changing the ones we’re already doing.

And we don’t have to wait until the reality we want has arrived before participating in it.

The change may be so subtle that nobody notices it. Perhaps even we don’t notice it at first.

But all those little actions are creating compatibility with something different.

So, look at a reality you would like to experience more fully. What tiny action could you take today that belongs to that reality?

And what familiar action could you change or put down because it belongs to one you no longer want?

After all, the millions of little things that make up our lives are happening whether we pay attention to them or not.

We might as well choose which ones we do pay attention to, right?