Make the Scene Smaller

In 2021, my partner was given six to nine months to live.

We had been traveling full-time for nearly five years at that point. We immediately stopped, moved back to my home state to be near my family, and settled back into a house so he could begin his healing journey.

It was in our first days here that I found The Game of Life and How to Play It.

I listened to the audiobook three or four times the first day. It’s short, just a couple of hours. I just kept it in my ear while I was going about my day, doing laundry, making dinner, washing dishes.

I let the words seep in. I continued listening to this book for the next six months and nearly nothing else. I stopped going on social media and watching YouTube videos. I just let this one little book carry me through a situation I didn’t want to be in.

It brought me a lot of comfort. The narrator’s voice was soothing.

And it also gave me some really simple practices to carry throughout my day.

While he was going on his healing journey, I started wondering what I could do. You can feel a bit helpless in a situation like this.

I never asked “why is this happening to us?” - don’t ask questions you don’t actually want the answer to.

Instead, I started to ponder, what would mean that things were going right?

So I tried to imagine it.

Here’s how that went…

I couldn’t do it.

At first, I’d try to imagine these big scenes of exactly how I wanted life to be, but it was so far from how things were at that moment that, not only did it not feel good, but I couldn’t really get a grasp on it either.

If I tried to create a big complete image in my mind, I couldn’t hold it. It felt overwhelming and like I was trying too hard.

So, I went for simple.

What did I want? I wanted him to be better.

What was a short, tiny scene that would mean he was better?

I imagined him walking out of the bedroom, me asking how he’s doing, and him saying, “I feel great. I’ve never felt better.”

That’s it. That’s the whole picture.

It was easy to imagine because it was something that was already happening everyday (just not with those words). It was something I could see in complete detail.

It was something that felt real.

I replayed it every night as I fell asleep, over and over. I’d imagine it throughout the day too. Whenever it occurred to me, I’d play that tiny little scene on the screen of my mind.

I probably imagined it thousands of times.

And one day he walked out of the bedroom and said exactly what I had been imagining for so long.

“I feel great. I’ve never felt better.”

I remember standing there thinking, “Oh my gosh! He actually said it.”

Florence Scovel Shinn writes that whatever any of us feels deeply or images clearly is impressed upon the subconscious mind.

I think a lot of people are making things too hard. They’re trying to imagine these detailed scenes. They want to know how they got there. They try to imagine all the steps that took them there.

I didn’t think about any of that. I just imagined something very short and normal, but something that would mean he was doing better.

And now we’ve already gotten ten times as much time as they said he had, and we’re not looking at life with an expiration date anymore.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used my imagination in this way either. I did a very similar thing when full-time travel was still a dream I had, and I’m using it right now for other things.

If you want to try it this week, here’s what I’d suggest.

1. Find something you can already see. Not a fantasy location or a version of your life you’ve never lived.
   
   Don’t try to imagine a far off end goal, start with something much closer, something that would be the bridge to the next thing.
   

2. Imagine a doorway you walk through, the moment you open your laptop, or your drive home. Somewhere your mind can go without fully p

3. retending. Somewhere you can see, smell, hear and feel.
   

4. Then change one thing inside it - one sentence or the expression on someone’s face. Find one small piece of evidence that the thing you want has already happened.
   

   Keep it under fifteen seconds.
   

5. Run it as you fall asleep, because you’re going to sleep anyway. This is a way better use of your mind as you drift off to sleep than thinking back over your day or planning tomorrow.
   

6. And then let it feel normal. It doesn’t have to feel like an event. The power isn’t necessarily in the intensity, but in the repetition.

Have you ever tried anything like this before?

Try it out and let me know how it goes.

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In my Skool community, Living the Game of Life, we’re reading through The Game of Life and How to Play It as a group right now in The Game of Life Transformational Book Experience, a summer book club reading two chapters a week for seven weeks.

The book is a hundred years old, and it’s under a hundred pages, and I keep coming back to it. I need the touchpoint, the reminder.

If that sounds like something you’d want, the door’s open.

We have Interactive Chapter Companions for each of the ten chapters.

It’s FREE to join! Jump in any time.

The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn

Get your copy of the book here!

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