When I was a child I was fascinated with the Aladdin story where he rubs the lamp and a genie pops out to grant him three wishes. What a gift, right? The genie just snaps his fingers and voila, wishes granted! What kid doesn’t dream up his own three wishes? A new car, a million dollars, the perfect body?
So one day during my high school years I was having a conversation with a friend and asked him what he would wish for if he had three wishes. Money, a hot girlfriend, and a kickin’ car was his answer. Then he asked me what I’d wish for and I said a million dollars, the perfect body, and 3 more wishes. 😉 We played the “wishing for more wishes” game for a while until our list of things we wanted was pretty long.
But as I got on in years I began to reconsider what I would really wish for if I was ever presented with the opportunity. You have to be prepared for everything right? And if a genie ever did pop out of a lamp and offer me three wishes I wanted to be ready. Around this time I’d seen a lot of tv shows and read books about people’s wishes backfiring on them; like when the guy wishes for a million dollars so the genie kills his wife who had a million dollar life insurance policy on her. So as I thought about my wishes I wanted to make sure there would be no loop holes.
My first wish was for world peace. But then I realized it probably wouldn’t last because people would just revert to fighting again. You really have to earn world peace. So my wish was this: For 48 hours only I want the world to be in a state of total love and total peace so that when the world reverts back to its previous state after 48 hours people will have had just a taste of what could be achieved if we work really hard at this. Basically an incentive to change their ways when they could see the reward awaiting them.
My second wish was for everyone to be afflicted with a sense of conscience. I figured if people really cared about how their actions affected others they would make better choices.
My third wish was for everyone on our planet to have their basic needs taken care of: food, clothing, shelter, etc.
I carried those wishes around with me for a long time, ready to present them to my genie when he appeared. Hey, luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparedness and I wasn’t going to be caught napping if a genie ever appeared to me.
As I grew older and matured I realized that making wishes that affect the world was not actually my responsibility. I realized that my true responsibility on this planet was just to work on myself. It’s not that I didn’t care about the rest of the planet, of course I did. It’s just that I realized the only person I had the right to mess with was myself. People need to grow and learn at their own rate, for their own reasons. So my three wishes changed again. I thought long and very hard about it but really the answer to the three wishes question turned out to be very simple once I tuned in to what I really and truly wanted out of my life. Today, these are still my three wishes:
To really know myself.
To really know another.
For another to really know me.
That’s it. In my heart I believe these are the three most powerful wishes I could make. These are the wishes that provide me the most growth and insight into my own self. I believe that when you fully know yourself you really understand the universe. What is the saying? “Know a grain of sand completely, and you will know the universe in its entirety.” When Steve and I first met, I shared these wishes with him and he understood how important they were to me and how much thought I put into making them. Steve and I share everything; our thoughts, experiences, hopes, dreams, desires, fears, pain, and disappointments. He is the one I’ve chosen to know completely, and he understands how important it is to me that he completely knows me as well.
What I didn’t realize when I made these three wishes is that the genie was inside of me. I had the power to make all three wishes come true on my own. I stopped looking for the lamp.
There’s a genie inside of you waiting to hear your three wishes; in fact, he may already be granting your wishes even if you don’t realize you’re making them. Are you consciously choosing your wishes? Be careful what you wish for, you will get it.
What are your three wishes?
