We find what we look for.

It sounds simple, but just sit with it for a while.

I found myself thinking this when I was listening to reports about the recent discovery of gravitational waves. Einstein first had the idea 100 years ago and people have been searching ever since.

And I wondered – if Einstein hadn’t imagined this, hadn’t posed the possibility – would anyone have been looking? Would they have recognised what they saw and heard without his theory to frame the signals? And amazingly, the timing was so perfect that the LIGO detector was turned on just weeks before the gravitational waves passed over our earth. That’s synchronicity on a grand scale!

Of course, if we’re not looking we’re not likely to find much. We might be lucky and stumble across things, or be fortunate to be offered things that meet our needs. But without looking, without paying attention with some sense of what we need to find, we’re walking through life backwards, only recognising what might have been when its passed behind us.

So I think the clearer we can be about what we want, the more creatively we can imagine, and set our intention toward it, the more likely it is that we’ll discover what we need, what makes our heart sing, what makes us whole. We can think about this as setting goals, or visualisation, or even manifestation. I think what’s important is the thought and the intent.

And in the context of space, so enormous that everything seems possible, its almost as if anything we can imagine, once looked for, will be found.

I do start to wonder whether our imagining can be a truly creative, generative act, that actually brings our thoughts into existence. A friend has talked about this for some time, and now, thinking about it this way, it makes sense to me.

We find what we look for.