Today I am grateful for my family.  My oldest sister is in from NY and we’ve been able to really spend time together for the first time in a couple of years.  It feels different this time around.  Sure, I’m older, sure, I know the changes I’ve endured since turning 40, sure I’ve changed a lot of facets of my life.  But I’m confronting things I didn’t expect to (discussions on aging and death and the fear of losing my parents), making choices about where other people are in their lives and my role in it (my friends’ behavior, the gaslighting from it, habits at home), and lessons on control (I like to be in the driver’s seat, I want to fix things, I want everyone around me happy—and I want to be happy too).  These are all things we have very little control over and the best we can do is find ways to ground and connect.  To discharge the energy that holds us where we are like hostages, unable to make choices because we are in some unseen battle of the wills with what we think it should be and what is.  It takes practice and patience and belief that we are safe.  Family gives us that sense of security and we have to accept that sometimes the look of what family is changes.  Loss, grief, development, movement, evolving, are all part of life.  There is a time for all of it. 

Today I am grateful for new lessons in finding myself.  We took a trip to a temple not terribly far from where we live, something my sister had mentioned a long time ago and it attracted my attention then.  I was too afraid to go alone, too afraid to meet her there, too afraid to leave my home at certain times.  But yesterday, we went and it was a beautiful experience.  The warmth of the woman who opened her door, for letting us stay well past the 10 minutes she had left in the day, for the conversation we had with her that opened new doorways to my heart, for the gentle reminders of what I still carry and need to let go of, I am so incredibly grateful.  I may have found a way to stay on the path, the next step in what I need.  I feel like I’m constantly losing more and more pieces of myself and I’m not sure how I feel about it.  Perhaps a little sad at letting go, a little scared at how much I’m losing, a little disappointed at the realization that I still have so much work to do.  But I know all of that comes with reason—and I can at least appreciate that everything happens for a reason.  I didn’t approach this thinking I had all the answers and that once I found what I was looking for that I was done.  I also didn’t realize how much there really was to let go of.  So the work continues.

Today I am grateful for strength.  Right now I’m facing a lot of fear of being alone from several different arenas: the loss of friends, the loss of a relationship that I put above everything for too long, the pending loss of everything due to the natural course of life.  I needed ways to remember that I am strong and the universe is providing them.  I can’t say I’m terribly thrilled at the lessons, but I guess if we have to learn something, it isn’t necessarily up to us how that happens.  It’s up to us how we receive it.  There has been one lesson I’ve been avoiding for decades now and it rears its head again right now.  The only way out is through, right?  I’m tired of running, tired of waiting, tired of delaying what I need to know because I’m afraid of what it means in relation to my comfort and what I’ve built.  We can’t keep things the same if we want to change, no matter how attached we are to it.  We can’t carry it with us.  So I am grateful for learning how strong I am and what I can carry but I’m also grateful to learn to be strong enough to put certain things down.  We talk about strength like it only matters what we can carry and we so often ignore what it takes to leave things behind.  I am grateful to have the option to leave things where they lay, and as scared as I am that I may not find them again or find my way back to myself, I am grateful to work on accepting the lesson. 

Today I am grateful for understanding what belongs to me and what doesn’t.  I guess I needed reminders of what I needed to stay out of—and where I needed to step up.  It’s hard to make the distinction when we’re already facing overwhelm to a degree. The lines blur in many ways.  I can’t fix everything.  I can’t do the work, even for the people I love.  I didn’t think I was still living at surface level but I have been.  There were many moments of flow yesterday, my sisters called it a vortex—and I felt it.  From the conversation we had meeting a perfect stranger to seeing the grace that stranger had with welcoming us even at the end of the day, to finding books on the same topics we discussed with that woman, to finding artwork that represented us, to the million little moments that showed us we were related.  Topics we discussed on random things like fairies and gas and berries and particular authors showed up just as we talked about them.  I know what I have to face now.

Today I am grateful for giving.  I allowed myself to get really caught up in some heavy crap happening in my life right now so I am grateful for the reminder that we still have energy to give, that I have energy to give.  I’m grateful for the reminders to be where I am right now. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead

I heard a segment from an interview Bill Murray gave to Joe Rogan discussing a book written about the death of John Belushi and he talked about how the entire story changes when we talk to the periphery of people involved in a situation.  He noted how important it is to speak to the people actually involved in it, those in the room where it’s happening, and how easily people can be manipulated into believing what they are fed.  He equated these stories to framing Nixon—like who we listen to, who we believe creates the narrative and if someone could tell these stories about his friend, people barely involved, then it’s possible that the story of what we believed for decades may not be right either.  We have to see all sides of the story and sometimes we have to do a little research to understand it.  Most importantly is that we can’t take anything at face value because what’s shared is always off of someone else’s experience or perspective.

In that regard, I think one of the most important messages here is we have to remember that we always know the truth.  People can tell whatever story they want and that doesn’t make it true.  If we know what happened, if we were there, then the opinion of those not even present really doesn’t matter.   Sure, we can worry about perception and implications of what people think—but all that goes away.  There will come a time when all of us are forgotten.  Granted with social media and the internet, our mark may be a bit longer lasting than it used to be because we felt the need to document everything for posterity so to speak.  But most of us will be forgotten.  Death is the great equalizer and the stories get faded and diluted over time, like some decades or even centuries long game of telephone where someone started it with “I like cheese” and suddenly we’re hearing “France makes fancy bees.” 

Now, that isn’t to say that what wo do doesn’t matter and it isn’t to say that what people say about us can’t be detrimental.  The key is discernment and knowing what to take to heart versus what to roll off our backs.  Choosing the battels so to speak, because the game can quickly turn into wasting our precious time correcting the story to people who really didn’t matter in the first place.  We need to keep an eye out for those moments that don’t sit right and make the choice whether or not to correct it or adjust or just let it be.  I’ve shared before how much it bothered me what was said about me in high school.  On the surface that seems trivial and I know it won’t matter—I’m not even sure other people would have saved that documentation.  What bothered me the most is that the level of effort I put into that work was completely demeaned and that interpretation is what was left for people to see.  It is bothersome—but it also doesn’t matter.  The world will change and shift again in 100 years and everything as it stands today will seem silly just as it does when we look back now.  So all we can do is live the life we love in the moment and do the best we can—it all gets interpreted or forgotten anyway so learn to love those fancy bees.   

It’s become a tradition for me to write a post about freedom on July Fourth because freedom is such a multifaceted and highly emotional word that I think we need to talk through every now and then. I think the word means so much to me because I never understood what it really meant.  I didn’t face any type of hardship related to basic needs and by most counts I lived a privileged life—something I am grateful for every day.  Sometimes the only way to meet our basic needs is to fall in line with expectations of others.  Sometimes we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves too and we trap ourselves in a never ending loop of people pleasing or self-loathing or both.  I started to consider the other aspects of freedom: how much of this do we dive into on our own—like if train myself to focus on all the distraction and fun available, then I don’t have to focus on why I feel bad, what I’m really concerned about, what is really important.  In essence, I become a willing prisoner of my own mind.  And I fully acknowledge how easy it is to get distracted by everything today.  Right now as I type this I’m listening in on a meeting, I’m texting two people and I’m trying to keep my thoughts straight and steal snips/quotes for future pieces.  I do that to myself.  I can stop it at any time. 

Freedom is of course a physical thing, but what we need to talk about is mental freedom.  The way we stick to our own stories, the way we glorify feelings, putting responsibility onto others.  No, no one likes to do anything wrong, no one likes to make mistakes.  But we trap ourselves in the repetitive cycle of thoughts that force us to rehash every negative incident we ever did and then, just for extra funsies, we make that negative moment somehow mean we ARE a horrible person.  A mistake is a moment and something to learn from.  It isn’t a brand we are meant to wear forever.  We hurt ourselves thinking we are somehow absolving some sort of scarlet letter when all we are doing is embedding the mistake further and further into our neural pathways.  There comes a point where we have to take accountability and watch the trajectory of our thoughts.  I have never hidden that I needed help in this regard both professionally and chemically (medicine) and I often spoke of how hard it was on that journey to find both kinds of help along with a support system that worked for me.  But without taking the time to question my thoughts, I never would have tried to put a stop to them.  I don’t pretend that everyone is able to do that, I don’t pretend that every problem ranks the same in everyone’s life.  The result is the same, however, in how we decide to manage it: we move forward or we let ourselves drown.

Truth be told I am still scared of the depths of what I find in my brain.  I lived on repeat for a long time, trying to find different ways to look at the same story over and over again.  It helped for a while because it taught me to be a little more analytical and see the situation from all sides.  It made me understand my involvement in these situations and gave me a firm grasp of what I could and couldn’t control.  What I realized, however, is that there came a point where I would still get stuck on what I could have done differently, the things I couldn’t control.  And what good did that do?  There was no changing the past and it took a long time to stop using it as an excuse.  It gave me an explanation and that is what I had to do with it—I had to learn from it to move forward.  So.  Today is about many types of freedom. Freedom to buy the shoes we want, freedom to go for that walk, freedom to change the job, and our hair, and even what we believe in.  We get to decide what we learn more about and what that means for our futures—individually and collectively.  We need to stop telling the same story over and over again, especially for the parts we can’t change.  Allow ourselves the gift of being free in our minds as well.  Free to find a new path, to turn a new page, and to live how we are meant to be.            vvvv

I don’t have a direct quote on this one, but I saw a discussion Jon Bernthal had where he references the death of ego and how life matters more when you put aside ego.  He mentioned something along the lines that ego isn’t important but we have to matter to someone and we have to know we matter.  So being the best and biggest in something ultimately matters very little if we don’t have someone to share it with.  As humans it’s natural to want to leave a mark—the preoccupation with those we remember from history and the stories we have been told for millennia stick with us.  Who wouldn’t be fascinated with the idea of being remembered forever?  The problem is the difference between famous and infamous is a fine line and we have to remember that it isn’t always important that WE are remembered, rather it’s what we DO.  There are plenty of people in history remembered for some pretty terrible things so simply being known isn’t always a good thing.  The human creature needs to be known by those who matter, by those who see the soul within and help guide, shape, and walk with that person.  The connections we form are meant to shape each other, not just mar each other.  When we get over how things look or worrying about how we look to other people, we can focus on doing the work we need to.    

There is a shift that happens in life, a shift that can happen any time, that shows us very clearly what matters.  Some people face it in mid-life but that isn’t always the case.  The feeling is always the same: the discomfort where what we do no longer feels right and we suddenly understand with absolute certainty that there is more to life than what we’ve been trained to do, more to life than what we were told matters.  We simultaneously want less and more out of life.  It coincides with the realization that we truly do have limited time on Earth, limited time with the people we love, limited time to do the things we love.  You’d think since this is a phenomenon shared by nearly every human to ever have existed that we would stop repeating the patterns that lead us to these moments in the first place.  We’d learn to do what matters sooner and we teach our kids what matters sooner.  I struggle with breaking some of the things my parents emphasized like good grades and kids should do what they’re told.  I am not a harsh parent and I do like to help my child explore his interests—but I see so many parents focus on how kids feel rather than doing what they love.  Like, a lot of his friend’s parents talk about how others make them feel and expressing their feelings back (which serves a purpose) but I focus on figuring out how what we DO makes us feel, how we feel doing what we love, and how we feel with those around us.  Those are important distinctions.

We let the ego run the show when we care more about how someone made us feel than we care about the work we do or how we can combine complementary goals to make something better.  We have to stop valuing someone’s feelings higher than someone else’s, and we have to stop letting ourselves be victimized by our interpretation of events.  That’s letting ego call the shots.  It’s easier to see the big picture and what we have to do when we take ourselves out of the picture.  It isn’t about finding ways to be the hero—it’s about finding ways to help the situation.  I know firsthand the frustration at not being heard and having my efforts ignored.  I know the frustration at doing work that we may never see the benefit of.  It comes down to how we feel while doing the work.  If the only joy we get is when the project is finished, then did the reason behind it even matter? Not really because it was just an item off the list.  Make sure to start asking ourselves if what we do benefits our hearts as well as those around us and that will serve as a reminder to keep focused on what matters: what we can bring to the table rather than what we take off it.

“Remember: You are braver than you believe, smarter than you seem, and stronger than you think.” I first read this quote in the context of Winnie The Pooh.  It made me think of how easily we get thrown off track.  How the distraction of the world surrounds us and we suddenly find ourselves lost in a sea of thoughts and fears, things designed to weigh us down when all we’re trying to do is float.  I often wonder if all those thoughts are somehow designed to help us.  Like, we are so hard wired for survival that the brain is acutely fine tuned to anything that has potential to harm us.  In this day and age that would seem to include our social and financial standing, We fixate on the small things, the way things seem, because the mind is trained to focus on the little things that make us appear weak.  This is the beauty and trouble with being human: we define and decide things.  We make the choice about what is acceptable and what isn’t and we use those definitions to determine where we fit in with this.  I will say for as connected as this world is, it is still pretty damn isolating. 

A wave of people over multiple generations have sought to infiltrate the world with love, light, and hope.  This was often met by people who believed in power and control.  The idea of love, light, and hope is beautiful and suggests the inherent worth we are all born with as well as the idea that there really is room for everyone to succeed.  That idea directly conflicts with the quest for power—it is a danger to power.  So for those who seek power, the easiest way to keep that going is to create competition and fear and distraction and division.  We need to remember who benefits from that: those seeking power with consumerism, those out for their own self-preservation who have forgotten that if we work together, we can preserve us all.  The purpose of this life is so much simpler than we make it.  There is truly so little to fear in this world.  The only reason we fear each other is because we think someone is going to take away what we have worked for, what we have spent our time on.  We fear we are going to lose our place in society if we don’t keep up with all the crap around us. 

So I want to share a little bit of that light and remind everyone that we are all brave, we are all smart, and we are all strong.  We are born that way, and no one can take that away from us.  It’s SO easy to forget that in a society that tells us we need to earn everything and that if we don’t meet certain standards at a certain time that we aren’t good enough.  It’s even easier to forget that when bravery, smarts, and strength all look different for different people.  They come in varying forms and at different times and some of us have to learn in different ways.  That doesn’t make that person weaker than someone else.  What we can do is focus on what we do have, what we know about ourselves, who we are and prioritize being the best version of that possible.  It is up to us, it always HAS been up to us to highlight those things in ourselves that make us shine.  It’s hard to remember to let other’s darkness flow away when that’s all we’re fed every day.  So I want to be a little light today and help you all remember the very best in ourselves.      

One of the leaders from my side business made a comment about social media and how the audience should know what you do without you having to explain it.  It made my head spin.  Perhaps because I’m naturally all over the place, thoughts whirling, not a clear direction because there is so much I want to do.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t think a person is able to ever fully display all facets of themselves in a snapshot, a thumbnail, 240 characters.  And I also think that there are different intentions with different platforms and even different profiles.  So the point, for me at least, became about how to be intentional with what I share. The intention behind any act is what matters.  In the same vein, when we operate with intention the purpose of what we do is clear.  Even then, I will still add for those with multi-faceted purposes, that level of clarity isn’t always possible.  The point is to draw people in, get enough attention to rouse curiosity and go from there. 

Life is about building a story and learning how to share it.  we all have a story to tell, we all have goals, and the combination of those things brings us to our purpose and intention.  If someone isn’t sure about your intent after scrolling through your content, that’s a different story.  The same can be said for life at that point: if you aren’t able to establish a clear goal or purpose then you won’t get where you want to be.  The point being when all the cards are on the table, if we still can’t tell where you stand, that can be problematic.  I do want to add a reminder that no matter what, people aren’t omniscient so there will be a degree of explanation in all we do—we are human and we can’t avoid that.  As a whole we need to stop the expectation that people know everything about our preferences and style with just a look.  We want to get away from rash judgements so we need to break the habit of expecting people to know how to treat us with just a look.

Devising and crafting a persona takes time—think about how long it takes us to be comfortable with who we are, to have an awareness of self that we are confident enough in to declare “This is who I am.”  If it takes us that long to make a determination and declaration of who we are, then how can we expect others to have that knowledge/understanding as well? Do I want someone to be able to put the story together to figure it out?  Absolutely.  Do they need to do that from a single snippet, a moment in time? Absolutely not.  Curating anything is a delicate art and when it comes to personality and desire/drive, that’s an even more delicate thing.  And those tastes change, those goals change, the priority around them change.  Life isn’t meant to be stagnant, defined on one thing.  It’s meant to flow and adapt and we are as well.

I saw this on Threads but didn’t see who this was actually credited to.  It caught my ear and I wanted to share it.  I have a lot of concern with AI and what it can/will/might do but that isn’t to say I don’t see value in it.  I do feel there have been valid points and value so when I heard the clip below, it made me think and I wanted to share it to give some consideration for the point of how to break the patterns we’ve created in society.  So here it is–How to raise a child in the 21^st century according to AI: Alright here we go.  If I were to raise a child who doesn’t become a broken adult, I wouldn’t follow the current education system because the system is designed to raise obedient consumers.  First instead of addiction, I’d teach them deep focus and falling in love with boredom and teach the super power of learning how to learn.  Second, instead of processed food, I’d teach them to grow their own food and cook with single ingredients.  Instead of trusting pills, I’d teach them to listen to their body, test and fix root causes.  I’d teach them to move like our ancestors, crawling, climbing, and jumping.  Then I will teach them to question authority, to ask who profits from this information, and to recognize propaganda when it’s packaged as normal.  Then I’d raise them with challenges and struggle because mental and physical muscles aren’t built in comfort.  I’d show them that technology is a tool not a master, and that intuition, sleep sun, and nature are non-negotiable operating systems.  And most of all I’d teach them to be sovereign in mind, money, and body because the future won’t be kind to the dependent

Today I am grateful for my voice.  I’ve had to make some tough decisions over the last few days regarding relationships that at one time were truly solid.  Signs have been on the wall that these relationships were suffering and that things needed to change for a while—and I had done what I could to fix them.  I’d communicated clearly where my concerns were and what I wanted to do to move forward.  None of those things happened with any of the parties involved and frankly it escalated to a giant slap in the face that these people had no intention of ever changing their behaviors no matter what we explained or asked—no matter how rational.  Their intention was to do what they wanted and tell us to fuck off in the process if they weren’t getting what they wanted.  Adult friendships are hard enough because we are all well set in our patterns and beliefs and it can be harder to see where we may be at fault when some cracks start to form.  But I am no longer taking on the weight of someone else’s shitty behavior, I am not letting shitty behavior slide, and I do not need to bend to accommodate people who can’t see that what they are doing is wrong based on standards we learned in kindergarten.  So I’m speaking up for myself, my family, and what is right.     

Today I am grateful for self-respect.  I need to follow up gratitude for my voice with gratitude for having enough respect for myself to use my voice.  I’ve so often played the peace-keeper, trying to find both sides of the situation so we can reach an agreement, that I often allowed what I was really feeling or thinking to take a back seat.  I tried over and over again to tell people what I was feeling in the hopes that the behavior would stop or we could reach a compromise or with the hope I would at least get an explanation.  When that didn’t happen it was evident that we did not hold each other in the same regard or with the same respect.  So this is a teaching moment and a learning opportunity for all of us involved: even if we are close to people, sometimes we have to worry more about being heard than we do about keeping the peace.  No one should ever feel bowled over in a relationship and when we voice our concerns and those matters aren’t addressed, then we need to be strong enough to walk away even if they are people we love.  I respect myself enough to know we are being fed crap and that the behavior will not change.  Sometimes doing the right thing hurts—but we do it anyway and I have no regrets. 

Today I am grateful for help.  I am grateful to receive help and I am grateful to give help.  Help isn’t a conditional thing, we all need help, sometimes in unexpected ways and times, and we need to give help.  Most importantly we need understand what a gift it is to be able to help.  As we get older, we will face mortality and fears and we have to accept that people and things we knew change—we all change.  We all become dependent on something and watch those who once held positions of power in our lives start to shift toward the point where they need help.  We are all human and time humbles us all.   

Today I am grateful for family, both blood and chosen.  I’ve come to realize how much we need that inherent support from people.  Not the kind of blind support that looks the other way, but the type of support that is there no matter what and still manages to shape us.  The family that understands who we are.  I grew up in a decently sized family that shrank down from a very large family, and now we are smaller still and I am so grateful to have the family I do, the people who have stuck with me, the people who understands the goal/point.  Life throws some nasty curve balls sometimes so it’s nice to know there are people who just get it—to laugh with, to cry with, to dig into the dirt with, and to create with—and those who support us when we go on to create something on our own.

Today I am grateful for adaptation.  I’m still going through some growing pains with the changes in my life but I am 100% leaning into the changes.  I truly couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given because these are literally things I’ve wanted and dreamt of for a while.  I’ve wanted to be able to call the shots in my life, I’ve wanted to live on my own schedule, I’ve wanted to maintain my health, my house, and my business while working, and I’ve wanted to start the transition to my life being supported by the things I love doing.  I understand the saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks because I’m working on that myself—the patterns we live are so deeply engrained that shifting that really can be difficult.  But I now respectfully disagree because I understand that old dogs can learn new tricks, it just sometimes takes a little longer.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead

The state of the world, or at least the state of the world that’s portrayed to us, is pure chaos.  We encourage and promote martyrdom and victimhood for the sake of our feelings not being recognized.  I am 100% guilty of that myself.  I am human and I know we are all susceptible to the things that go through our heads.  I know we worry about our value and worth and that our ego demands attention and recognition all the time.  I know that our society has promoted and pandered to the ego, believing attention is the most important thing we can ask for.  We’ve equated attention/recognition and money with survival and power.  We’ve convinced ourselves that power is the only way to survive, believing power and dominion over others somehow makes us more important or more likely to get ahead.  We still haven’t learned that power makes us targets, that power has its own level of responsibility, and that power comes in various shapes, forms, and sizes.  Power over others is limited and tenuous. Power over ourselves is absolute and can be harnessed for the greater good.

The leadership in this world leaves something to be desired—and that isn’t targeted to any one leader in particular.  I think part of the problem is that we have We have all fallen short remembering what the goal is, that we are here to work together to improve our state not our standing.  One of the key lessons we need to remember is that it isn’t about being right, it’s about doing what’s right.  We don’t have to agree on anything except doing the right thing.  Some may argue that our definition of the right thing may differ—and that can be true—yet we also have an innate knowing of right and wrong.  We are also born knowing compromise and that there is a middle ground.  We are born with the innate desire to lift people up.  It’s only as we are exposed to different beliefs around power that we start to shift toward the idea of personal power.  We all know what it feels like to not be heard or to be left out—and the truth is it doesn’t feel good.  But that isn’t the cue to find a way to assume all control, it’s the cue to find a way to make ourselves heard or to realize we need to find a different audience.    

We aren’t here for a long time and it is human nature to find a way to leave our mark.  We like the idea of being remembered but it is more important to question WHAT we are remembered for.  There are ways to be remembered that have nothing to do with power.  Instead, we can be remembered for looking for the right thing in all situations.  We live in a divisive culture where we think it can only be one thing or another but the mark of maturity is looking for that middle ground.  I don’t have to agree with all you say but that doesn’t mean I don’t see the value in parts of it.  We tend to make people all right or all wrong and that isn’t the case just as we know we aren’t all right or all wrong.  In Robin Sharma’s Leader with No Title (see my series on that as well)—seeking power (or the wrong kind of power) means nothing in the grand scheme of things.  We all have power in our lives, more than we allow ourselves to realize because we waste that energy on trying to control people and how they see things and what they do instead of controlling our emotions to arrive at the best place.  To change the world, to be the example of change, to do the right thing is to see the value in what is said over worrying about proving a point. 

I can believe with everything in me that I am a lion, I may even have the heart of a lion.  That does not in fact make me a lion.  No matter how much I believe, how much I feel it—it doesn’t change who I am.  But what we have lost sight of is the fact that being who we are doesn’t mean we can’t be who we want to be.  I can believe with all my heart that I am a 6’10” model who can sing better than anyone in the world and it will NOT change the fact that I barely touch 5’ and I am ok-ish at singing certain songs.  That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy singing and having fun with it or that I can’t learn how to sing better—but I will not be able to change that I barely touch 5’.  There are intrinsic parts of us we can’t change but that doesn’t mean we can’t become something closer to what we see inside, it doesn’t mean we can’t hone the skills to become the best version of what we see—it doesn’t matter if others don’t see it that way.  The point is matching the action with how we feel, not to make others believe/see/feel/do how we do.  That’s manipulation and bullying.  It isn’t anyone’s responsibility to figure me out and treat me how I see myself—it’s my job to be who I need to be and express that consistently to the world. 

Society has a lot of healing to do.  We’ve been grossly misinformed that we are the ones who need tending to, that the world somehow owes us this weird honor of somehow stopping for us, people somehow treat us exactly as we think in our minds, that the world sees us as we see ourselves, that we will get what we want simply because we think it.  It’s a real tough lesson for people to grasp that we have this so backwards. The world literally owes us nothing.  We are here by the grace of some divine gift, divine timing, divine presence that we can’t perceive with any senses yet we feel it all around us.  We can’t control it but we are of it and part of it.  That gives us no dominion over anything in this world but our own autonomy, our own presence, our own ability to recognize and utilize our gifts for the benefit of the world that sustains us without question or real demand beyond “Don’t intentionally fuck it up or we will move on to fuck around and find out on a whole new level.”  Yet somehow in spite of all the mistakes we make as humans, as much as we seem determined to destroy ourselves as much as we still have the audacity to believe we are owed something, the Earth keeps spinning and keeping us alive.

So with in this vast expanse of space and time, we are somehow afforded the gift of being here right now.  We are gifted the ability to find this balance between knowing we are meant for something greater and bringing that gift to the world while also understanding those gifts are ours to use and harness, but only on borrowed time.  The more we use those gifts for the benefit of the world, the greater return.  This existence, while it may seem to be all about us and how much we can get for as little effort as possible, is truly about the inverse. What we put in determines what comes out.  I don’t want to waste my time telling people how to see me, what to think about me, how to treat me—some of those things are simply lessons we missed as kids and have nothing to do with us anyway.  I would rather spend my time developing my gifts and sharing them with the people who get it, the people who resonate with that message.  I don’t want to spend my time fighting to be who I am or to make sure the world sees me as I see myself.  It’s far easier to simply be ourselves and go about our business.  We get more done that way.

This piece isn’t meant to disparage anyone or discourage anyone from going for their dreams—in fact, it’s quite the opposite.  The point of going for dreams has nothing to do with how people see us.  It has nothing to do with convincing others of anything about who we are.  This is about shifting our perspective to realize that how people see us has no impact on how we see ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, or how we think.  We are the only ones who prevent ourselves from getting where we want to be, from doing what we want to do.  It’s our belief in ourselves and what we think we can do that pushes us forward or stops us in our tracks—no one else’s.  Humans are simultaneously super smart and super dumb and we all operate on context and experience—none of which is the same for anyone—yet we believe we somehow need everyone to think and see as we do in order to have any value.  We are gifted the differences of opinion, perspective, and desire so we can learn from each other and so we can HELP each other and so we can return something of value to the world.  So we can spend a little less time focused on making people see/think/feel something and spend more time making sure our actions align with how we see/think/feel.  It makes all the difference.