Showing posts with label possibilities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label possibilities. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Wham! Life Hits Us.

 

“La de da da,” we come into this lifetime joyful, smiling, squirming bundles of possibilities. Oh, what fun. We will run and play and bask in the love of adoring parents. This is a vacation, playtime on earth—this beautiful planet with its colors and trees to climb and animals to play with, and…

 

Wham! Something hits us. What was that? I can’t go into the water because I can’t swim?

 

“Oh, okay, I’ll learn to swim.”

 

“La de da da. I’m a dolphin. Mom look at me. See how I glide through the water.”

 

“Mom, why are you crying?”

 

“What’s happening?”

 

“Daddy’s leaving? That can’t be. He’s supposed to stay here, live with us. You’re getting a what? A divorce? That can’t be, parents are supposed to live with each other. They are supposed to be here for me, for us, together.”

 

There are many others in the naked City, country, or hovel.

 

The point is we have created beliefs about how life is, but we go on building a life for ourselves. We go to school—well, that’s another story—the point is, though, that with those hits, we develop a view of how life is, and thus we develop a view of ourselves.

 

We see how people leave us, how we feel unloved, or how hard it was to maneuver the school playground, the lunchroom, the taunts or teasing. We might excel at interpersonal relationships, but there is usually something. We might think we are better than most—that’s an injury, too.

 

We have taken hits, and since they are emotionally charged, they impact us more than the gentle, happy ones. We were raised by parents who sustained hits of their own and, chances are, had no clue about raising kids. They had their own problems. However, together we muddled through. Maybe we had a best friend that filled in some of the holes in our psyche. Perhaps we had many friends, which further influenced our view of life.

 

The bottom line is that through all this, we developed beliefs.

 

I thought I had nothing to discuss today until I remembered yesterday’s email. A friend sent me a quote from Vincent Genna. It was, “Thoughts do not create, beliefs do.”

 

“Yes!” I yelled. “That’s the missing piece of the Law of Attraction puzzle.” We create through our beliefs, not from our thoughts. And most of those beliefs are held and exercised unconsciously.

 

Wow, this business of life is tricky.

 

But we’re adults now, and we can look back and throw those beliefs onto the wall to see if they stick. Are they true? Are they important to keep? Can we replace that belief with a more healthy, pertinent one? Perhaps they are absolutely not true. You did nothing to affect your parent’s personal problems. They were theirs, not yours. Maybe you can forgive them now.

 

I mentioned in a blog earlier that I was writing a memoir. Whenever I say it seems ostentatious to write one, think of it this way: I believe everybody should write one. Thus, my title Come On, I Dare You. Like, hey, don’t leave me alone in this. Every writer knows that a piece of writing affects the one writing it more than the one reading it.

 

From going over my life, I wonder now what my mother thought and felt when she discovered, at 16, that she was pregnant with me. I know she took her best friend with her when she went to tell my father. (I found out that later from her best friend.) She and my father got married and about four years later divorced, but that’s really all I know. She obviously felt she “Had to get married. It was shameful in those days to be an unwed mother. (Although it regularly occurred.) And she tried to hide it from me her entire life.

 

Once in the night, I heard her tell my stepdad, “I hope Joyce never finds out.” However, I knew. Kids know many things their parents try to keep from them. They also know that they shouldn’t know, so they stay quiet. I didn’t know, though, how much she suffered over finding that she was pregnant. And I don‘t know how much I shared her emotions since at the time, we were both sharing the same body.

 

That “trauma” could have contributed to some of my beliefs. 


Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Windows

Can you believe this? Some 400 years before Jesus was born, a man said this:

 

“Someday, in the distant future, our grandchildren’ s grandchildren will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge.” 

 

--Plato (PLATO’S DOCTRINE: 909 Relics of Greek Philosophy).

 

 

Reality is so compelling. It has so much momentum going it’s hard to stop or change direction. 

 

Brother, are you having a problem with life these days?

 

 Maybe it’s just me.

 

I was cruising along pretty well, not worried, then I felt something was bearing down on me. Yes, I know better. I know that when you are resonating with the good, you feel good. When you focus on the dire, the dangerous, the sick, you feel down, depressed, complaining, or just off-kilter.

 

So, how do you lift yourself up when something knocks you off-kilter?

 

When I realized that we don’t know what to believe anymore. I see that people believe lies, and we don’t know who is telling them to us and why. I saw that someone can drop a dire something on us, an insinuation, and not even sign their name to it, and what happens? It becomes spread into society. People glom onto the sick and disgusting. 

 

It has something to do with the way our brains work, how we can’t stop looking at a train wreck. It gets the adrenaline up—hell's bells, take a roller coaster ride, that will get the adrenaline up too.

 

We know that fear sells. Fear keeps us off-kilter. Fear makes us uncontrollable, but we can’t help it. Fear runs us. We let the media, and who knows what all, to affect us. I read that Memes are driving our culture. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram--these are all windows for us to peer into. When people have death, sickness, unrest, unemployment thrust into their face for over a year, it wears on them. We weren’t built to live under constant threat. 

 

Darn, I was looking out the wrong window. I have a philosophy about which window to choose—this is all figurative, you know. One window shows kids playing in the street, riding their bikes, and laughing. Another shows the neighbors quarreling. Some windows even look out upon downright fighting. 

 

And then I approach my kitchen window—this is real—and there is an orchid growing on the sill that has sent up a new spike and is budding. This is its third year to bloom. Maybe because it is looking out the window to the maple tree in the back yard that is bare now of leaves, but the tree and the orchid believe that spring will come and with it baby silky leaves that will flutter in the backyard.

 

We have to focus on the good, the healthy, the beautiful. 

 

We came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to suffer. We thought this time on Earth would be a grand vacation, a joyous one, so why isn’t it? Has the outside world done it to us? Could it be that our belief in suffering and decline has been passed down from generation to generation? Well, folks, now is the time to stop it. 

 

Now is the time, as Ralph Marston wrote, To “Breathe in the sweet air of limitless possibility and make life as rich as you know it can be.” 

 

Breath wrote Dido Owlnute:

“To pause

To make space

To collect your thoughts,

To remember,

To face the next moment, 

To choose.” 

 

“Remember, you made it this far through difficulties that seemed impossible. Remember how many times you were saved at the last minute—this time is no different.”—Bryant McGill.

 

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” --Marcel Proust

 

I came upon this picture, taken in Greece, of my daughter at 16. It is a beautiful window to look upon. She wasn’t posing but just standing there, and I snapped the picture.

 


 

 

“Truth isn’t always beauty. But the hunger for it is.”—Nadine Gordimer.