IN ALL MY SEMINARS I LEAD an exercise called “My Ideal Day.” If you were participating, I would ask you to take a piece of paper and write down in detail the most wonderful day you can imagine. The only requirement for each activity you list is that you would choose it from a sense of joy and delight rather than routine or obligation. When seminar participants do this process, they become very animated and usually come up with inspiring ideas about how they could actually create such a day and life.

In one seminar, a woman read aloud her essay describing her ideal day. After relating many delicious experiences, she read, “and then, in the evening, my husband and I go into Toronto to see our favorite opera performed by world-renowned singers. We ride in a big limousine, which allows my husband to stretch out his arthritic legs.”

When I heard her words, something struck me as out of tune. “Why,” I asked her, “would you include arthritis in your ideal day?”

“Well,” she answered, “I guess my husband has had arthritis for so long that I can’t imagine him without it.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “that is one of the reasons the condition has persisted.”
We must be careful to build our experience around our visions, rather than building our visions around our experience. Your history is not your destiny. Imagine a prisoner doing the “Ideal Day” exercise. “I get up in the morning, go out into the prison yard, and shoot some hoops with the other inmates,” he might envision. “Then I come into the prison cafeteria and find they are serving meat loaf for lunch . . .”

But why include prison in the vision at all? If you have been in prison for a long time (metaphorically speaking), you may have a hard time envisioning yourself out of it. But if you can, you are well on your way to freedom. Any vision that includes the prison is not doing you justice.

While I was a guest on a radio talk show interview featuring my book Handle with Prayer, a caller shared an inspiring story. “When my daughter was scheduled to go for surgery, I asked my prayer group to pray for a positive outcome to the surgery,” he recounted. “At the prayer group someone asked, ‘Why accept the surgery as a done deal? Let’s pray that your daughter be healed without the surgery.’ So we prayed for a natural healing. When I took my daughter for her next exam, the doctor informed me that her condition had cleared up and she no longer needed the surgery.”

I cite this story not to influence you against surgery, but to invite you to pray outside the box. Sometimes we do not ask for what we want, but for what we expect we can get, or what others tell us we should have. But if what we expect is less than what we want, we have sold ourselves, our prayers, and our God short. Abraham has said, “Never accept any reality unless it includes all of what you want.”

© Alan Cohen, 2004