Living in Pictures. By Lennie Esomitoje

Before reading this chapter, be sure to read Living in Pictures 1

It is those who put in the additional work of disciplining their mind that end up champions in their particular area, arena of the trade. To reach victory, excellence, success, nobility and fulfillment, you must discipline your mind. Psych yourself! So, think, talk and action yourself up.

Living in pictures forces people (the ones who do and those they bring under their spell) to do the necessary things, take the right actions, act in the right direction. This way of living forces its practitioners to face the realities every (present) challenge to their journey presents.

A targeted picture leads to a targeted future. And this lifestyle is not the same as presumptuous living, wish-bone living of building castles in the air. This is practical living; it puts all the parameters on the table, before coming up with a picture. It is more of having a holistic view of the journey, all the likely challenge, how to overcome and all that’s required to do it.

Living in picture or targeted (intentioned, decided) living is not vainglorying either; it is seeing and keeping abreast the hurdles to the price. It is painting pictures, first of the gain or profits in the desired, anticipated future, to boost one’s courage for the journey (and also to keep going until you get to the desired end).

Next, picture the likely, obvious challenges (obstacles, difficulties, hurdles) involved. And then think or reason out (and or sometimes involve a team of brainstormers or a mastermind alliance) the resources you would need to victoriously pursue your dream.

You also need to factor into your thinking time, the preparations and the disciplines you need to effectively, successfully pursue and achieve your future.

None of these is an airtight approach; there may be slips, trips and falls here and there as we go (and although we try to minimize these); they are part of the journey of greatness.

The crux of this presentation is that we should begin to use our minds –reasoning, thinking, rationalizing faculty to dress (paint, picture, plan, prepare) the future we want to spend the rest of the most of our lives in. As the saying goes, ‘the way you lay your bed, so shall you lie on it’. It is only that this time we are to use our minds to lay our bed, the future.

Our reasoning, thinking and rationalizing mind after proper analysis or imaginative sessions leaves our desired future entrenched in our conscious mind, from where it drops into the subconscious mind for storage. This suggests that we can change the negative pictures in the memory by consciously, intentionally painting their positive alternatives. 

However to change the pictures in our memory (delete from our subconscious the negative, hindering pictures), we must hold on to the new positive, preferable pictures long enough through making them our prayers, writing them out and speaking them out load to ourselves.

Lest our negative mindset shout us down and keep us from taking our lives into our hands and righting our future, it is good you know that it is not a difficult process. For your mind may be telling you right now, that is going to a great deal of work. I can tell you, it is not as complex as your mind may be suggesting right now. The idea is just for you to convince and tell yourself of the new picture of you that you’d designed. 

You can make the mind renewal, transforming effort, fun. For me I went calendar and magazine collecting; cutting out and posting pictures (and quotes) of great cities, beautiful sceneries, sports champions, great achievers –preachers, industrialists, statesmen, freedom fighters and great minds all over the walls of my little room off campus, in my undergraduate days. It was my response to what I learnt from “THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING” by Norman Vincent Pearle.

I rose up every morning to read and meditate on the quotes; one of which readily comes to mind “specific desires (prayers), yield specific outcomes (answers). Possibility mentality is called for in living the proverbial good life.  Optimism, positivism is the mindset you need to live the good life.

Another important issue is the quality (sort, kind and or nature) of the thought we are to frame up and dwell on. Pictures that had become real to us, that they’d become sort of a second nature to us, are on their way to delivering their tangible, physical alternatives.

Thoughts often falls under two broad categorizations: positive (profiting, helpful, optimistic, lifting, possibility, enabling, boosting) thoughts OR negative (defeating, hindering, deflating, pessimistic, paralyzing, discouraging, de-motivating) thoughts.

There are no neutral grounds in life; a ground (or soil) left uncultivated makes room for weeds to grow. The mind functions the way; it is either positive or negative. And when, where it is left neutral, it grows weeds of negative thought, negative lives.

Yes, negative thoughts are like weeds, they grow naturally, you don’t plant them. The only effort needed to grow them is to leave your mind uncultivated in its naturally negative state. Take charge of your mind to take charge of your life. The quality of your future is in the quality of management you give your mind.

If you are a religious (“dos” and “don’ts”) person, you will leave your life to chance, to deity, and do nothing at all about it. It is good you know that the Creator expects you to use time and chance to your favour, as you take charge of your thinking. The greatest show of laziness is refusal to think, and dictate the direction and pace of your life.

Reading Norman Vincent Pearle’s, “the power of positive thinking” was a major booster for me to master living in pictures; especially finding out that he was a clergy man. For a pastor to write a psychology book, with some metaphysics undertone (and in a day when such was castigated in religious circle), made it all the more interesting for me to read the book.

People in some religious circles still mistake “positive thinking” for an eastern religion practices. That is so far from the truth. No one can be more positive minded than God, who saw possibility of redemption at the garden of sin and failure, and took advantage of it. He showed man the way out of the garden of sin, unto a date with redemption in some future date He had pictured; where the seed of the woman shall bruise the head of sin’s chief perpetrator.