How to Use Contrast to Enhance Your Life

In my work as a Life On Purpose Coach many of my clients often experience times of "extreme contrast". These times can be very difficult and challenging and may have actually been what led them to seek out my services. So, let's look at how we can use contrast to actually enhance our lives.

Contrast is defined in the dictionary as 'to compare or appraise in respect to differences.' Now we can either use this contrast to be right and make others wrong -- which we often do-- or we can use it to further distinguish what we want in our life, who we are committed to being, etc. by looking at what we don't want -- the contrast -- and allow it to point us to what we do want.

Simple example. My family and I were recently in a community play. One of the college age girls in the cast that my 13-year old daughter, Amber, really likes and viewed as an older sister role model, invited Amber to spend the night and part of the next day with her. But when the night came, she suddenly couldn't do it, giving the explanation that she needed to clean her apartment instead. When Amber offered to help with the cleaning, she declined. We later found out a boy had offered to come over and fix dinner for her and a friend.

When I learned of this I was livid and indignant. How dare she treat my daughter this way? I was ready to call her and point out in very clear and angry terms the error of her ways. I spouted off for a while to Ann and Amber while driving home from rehearsal which helped me to calm down enough to consider another possible way to 'respond instead of react.' I finally got to the point that I decided to use this 'contrast' to look more deeply at what's really important to me, to examine my core values. From this examination I realized that integrity, which includes keeping one's word, is an important value of mine. In other words, integrity is something I am willing to invest time and energy into having more of in the world, especially in my world.

Now, it's likely that at some point I will speak to the young lady IF and WHEN I can discern a way to speak my truth in a way that she can hear it and be contributed to by it. And from a place of righteous indignation (which is where I was) isn't the place or way to speak that will serve.

So, when the Universe offers you up a big plate of extreme contrast, what will you discern and learn? What ways of being are you seeing in others and perhaps in yourself that you realize no longer serve? From there look to see what other way of being could serve to, in a sense, counterbalance the other way? If you viewed this contrast as the Cosmic UPS Truck trying really hard to deliver you a gift, what is the gift(s) wrapped within the packaging of this contrast?

©2005 Brad Swift of Life On Purpose Institute, Inc. This article can be reprinted freely online, as long as the entire article and this resource box are included.