Why bother with life?

We all start life with nothing.  We work our tails off to carve our way through the jungles of life. We struggle and claw and fight for every gain. Some of us manage to build vast empires of metal and stone. With our sweat and blood we build a legacy of wealth and prosperity that will hold for generations. Others of us make barely enough to survive, much less save or prepare for the future. Most of the rest of us live somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

But, life is a zero sum game. We start with nothing and we return to the earth with nothing. Nobody gets out alive. And you can't take "it" with you.

So what's the point? If all of your hard work and time spent aren't going to matter once you are gone, why do it? Why put in the effort? Why struggle? Why don't you just coast along with no effort whatsoever and let the waters of life just buffet you around randomly from shore to shore. Why not just follow the routine, with no plan at all? You could just do the minimum that is required of you to get by and follow the same path day in and day out until your body crumbles to dust.

You could do that. In fact many people do. But all those people, they aren't really living. They are just getting by and none of them are truly happy with what they have. They are just cogs in the great machine turning the wheel of ages. Days blurred to weeks, weeks blurred to months and years. Years blurred to decades until Death comes to collect them.

All those countless lives are wasted because people fail to understand and accept that the whole point of life is now. From the time we are born until the time we die, we are blessed with billions of nows. Each one is an infinitesimally small fraction of forever. Each is unique and unlike any other now that will ever occur.

Every moment that passes brings with it a new now. And the only now that ever truly matters is the current one. The old ones are gone and the future ones have yet to come. In order to live a happy fulfilling life, you get to learn to get the most you possibly can out of the current now. We can learn from past nows and prepare for future nows, but the only one we can live is the current now.

And that my friends is why we bother, why we plan and struggle and work and play. Most of the struggle is to make our future nows more enjoyable. But as far as grading our life on the whole, it is not the one now at the end of our life that is important. It is all of them collectively. Some nows will be better than others as no life is ever perfect all the time. But from my point of view a life well lived is one with more good nows than bad.

It is a delicate balance, between planning for the future and enjoying the present, but as I see it, it is the only life worth living.

A great new wonderful today

Welcome to a great, new, wonderful today. Welcome to a today that is pregnant with opportunities, overflowing with new possibilities for you to take advantage of, to make your life and the lives of those around you better than ever before.

Bah humbug you say? Yesterday sucked you say? Yesterday sucked, so did all the days before.Today is gonna suck and so will all the days that come after.

Well, sure. If you maintain that attitude you are guaranteed to be right. After all, attitude is everything. The universe brings you exactly what you honestly expect that it will. If you believe that your past is a mirror of your future, things can never get any better. If all you ever see of your past is darkness and no light and you think all that can be is what has been, your future is pretty bleak.

But why do that to yourself? In a universe filled with infinite possibility, one where you can have any future that you truly, deeply, honestly, desire, why create the same old dank depressing life you have always had? Given a choice, would you rather suffer through your future or enjoy it?

Why not fill it with warmth and light and hope? Expect more out of life. Politely demand it.

See the thing about yesterday is that its over. The past is static, unchangeable. You have taken advantage of every possibility in your past that you are ever going to. The future though is unwritten. It is dynamic.What is going on can change from moment to moment. Each day has more opportunity within it than you could ever hope to grasp. The possibilities are practically endless. You can decide at any point to make changes to your life that will make it better from this moment on.

If you are consistently convinced about and focused on how badly today is going to suck then you won't see the opportunities as they present themselves. If, however, you are absolutely sure that the current day holds opportunities for you that have so far been things undreamed of, if you know for sure that things are going to get better and better, your mind, heart and eyes will be open. This will enable you to see, experience, live and take advantage of those better things as they happen.

And tomorrow will be better still. Each day is a bigger, better day, than the day before it. No, you can't just skip ahead a few tomorrows. You need to truly live, experience and enjoy today. Though the past is static and unchangeable, each day builds upon the day before it.

Squeeze every drop of love and life and joy out of today, taking advantage of all the wondrous opportunities before you. Then and only then will you be truly prepared for the even greater, more awesome next day.

So again, welcome to a great, new, wonderful today and also welcome to a tomorrow filled with unlimited possibilities.

Your past

Hi.

I. Don't. Care. About.Your. Past. That seems pretty transparent to me. But maybe it's not. I want to be perfectly clear. I don't care if you used to be a transsexual neo-nazi pod person that drank human blood, lived in a castle made of human skulls, and ate live babies for fun. I don't care if you used to be in the service and killed dozens of people because Uncle Sam told you to. Or if you just murdered people because you wanted to. I don't care if are an alcoholic, or if you used to be a prostitute or a rapist. I don't care about all the crimes and sins you used to commit or the laws you used to break.

Yes. All of those things have dark tragic stories full of angst, fear and frustration attached to them. And if you need a shoulder to cry on or just feel that you need to confess to someone about the horrible, terrible things that you used to do, I am here for you. I will listen, my heart full of love and empathy, for your sorrow and tragedy.

Your past is your past. It is all of the things that you have done and experienced right up until this very moment. It is NOT who you are though. Your past is who you used to be. All of it. It isn't just what you did ten years ago. What you did yesterday is part of who you used to be. But, you can't change those stories. They happened.

What you can change is your future.  And it is your future that I care very much about. Your past isn't important to me, simply because it didn't happen to me. I didn't experience it for myself and in fact I can't every truly experience it.

I have my own crimes and sins in my past, things that I'm not proud of. These things in my past, they shaped who I was up until a certain point, until I realized that they don't have to. There is no real reason, why there needs to be any connection at all between who you used to be and who you are becoming, other than for you to remember where you started out.

Every moment is a new opportunity to reshape your future. You can step entirely out of the mold of your past and make a new you. Stop carrying around all the guilt and angst for past mistakes. You know what you did was wrong and you've punished yourself about it for long enough.Step into a new future, one where you use the experience that you've earned from the mistakes that you have made to do things right this time.

I know from both book learning and personal experience that the harshest judge there is lives inside each one of us. We punish, tear down and destroy ourselves, more harshly than anyone else alive could ever hope to do. So, I don't need to judge you based on your past, and I won't.

I will however judge your actions in the current and decide based on the outcome of those actions, if I think you are someone that should be around me, my friends and family. Even if I decide you shouldn't be around us, that doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, just not one with the kind of energy we want around us. And even then, sincere regret for your wrongdoings and a declaration of new intent for the future would be enough for me to reconsider.

In life your past trials and tribulations don't mean anything. The true test of a person is always the current test. It's the only one that matters. And then it becomes the past. Its importance fades and a new "true" test arrives.

What I care about is your future. Who you plan to be, and who you become, from this moment on are all I care about. Most of your past is who you were at your worst. What I am interested in is who you are at your best.

Show me

Vision. What you see, you create.

Ten years ago I had a vision of what I wanted my future, my now, to look like. And for the most part it does. There are parts that I wish were different, but the things that I was specific about in that vision happened more or less the way I wanted and expected them to.

When I was young it was pretty much just my mom and me against the world. We were dirt poor but I was happy.  But then she met my step-dad and it turned out to be me against the world. He made me pretty unhappy. And even when she did disagree with him, which was often, she submitted to his will in how to treat and raise me.

I decided around the ripe young age of six that I didn't have a family and wasn't going to until I could choose for myself who they were going to be. Fast forward through my teenage years full of frustration and angst. By the time I was in my mid-twenties I had gone through a lot of self empowerment and transformational stuff.

There was this one group of people that I regularly played Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games with. Most of them were amenable to my overall philosophy of empowerment and the pursuit to bring positive change to the world. We got along really well and spent a lot of time together. They were all good people. I got this idea in my head that these people should be family and that we should live together, pooling our resources and our debts, over time allowing the former to grow and eliminating the latter.

At the time we all lived in separate apartments. It appalled me the amount of money that was being thrown away every month. None of us owned our own residence and at the rate we were going none of us ever would. We were all separately struggling to survive.

My vision was for the core group, which at the time was four of us, to move into a house together, vastly cutting down on our monthly payments so we could get out of debt and actually own something, while at the same time bringing our message of personal growth and self improvement to the world.

For awhile I was fired up and really motivated and it showed in our results. It took a little over a year. But we did find a house big enough for us to move into. The problems came in that it was not just the four of us. Initially when we moved into the house there were not four but six of us. Things kept fluctuating until at one point there were twelve of us living in the house.

Our other friends had heard about our idea and thought it sounded great. They saw the good in what we were doing and jumped on the bandwagon. They wanted the pay off but they did not want to do the work of bringing the vision fully into reality. For awhile, it became pretty uncomfortable around here. Somehow it was harder to pay our bills with ten or more people working and living here than it was with four. The housing market falling apart did not help at all. The "new" people would not work together here and things were more or less chaos. I almost gave up.

Gradually, people started leaving. And with each person that left it actually got easier and easier to run our household.  Our debts are decreasing. Our secondary mortgage has been paid off.  There is a good chance that in the next year or so we will own our home free and clear. There are six people living in the house now, four core group members and two roommates. Or as I like to say it, four family members and two roommates. As a family we love and support one another. We do our best to make life better and easier for each other.

Over the last ten years a lot of mistakes have been made and a lot has been learned. I have a new vision now that includes the things that I have currently that are not exactly the way I want them and things that I do not have but do want. And this time I have a one year, five year and ten year vision. The shorter goals can be used to more directly focus on ensuring the larger picture turns out the way I want it to.

What does your now look like? Do your results match your vision from ten years ago? What is your vision for the future?

Day tight

While doing some reading the other day I came across a phrase that I really liked. The subject matter was about conquering worry. The phrase was "living in day tight compartments"  or locking each day off in your mind from every other day that happens.

People tend to have fear, doubt and worry over decisions that might need to be made in the future. That worry dampens our spirits and in some cases even our physical health. When we do this, our mood darkens and we do not enjoy our life. This is not a momentary thing. It goes on from the time that we become aware that whatever issue exists until the appointed time to handle it occurs. Even worse, quite often people worry over things that are not ever even going to happen, or things where the odds of them happening are so close to zero as to be not worth the time spent pondering it. But still their lives are filled with suffering while they wait for this terrible thing to occur.

Other times we agonize over choices we have already made thinking, feeling or believing that we should have done something else. This is even worse than worrying about something that has yet to happen because there is no set time limit for how long we will continue to cause ourselves to suffer over it. Countless millions of people are constantly bringing their lives to ruin over things that have already happened or that might never happen

This is foolish and in no way useful. When you are spending your time and energy in constant worry, your ability to reason goes out the window and as a result you can no longer resolve the issues that actually come up on a day to day basis. When this happens you are forcing your past and your future to annihilate your happiness in the present. This then perpetuates the cycle.

You fail to make good decisions in the present, which then becomes your past and you then are back to berating yourself for past mistakes. You then see no point in making an effort to use the new present to make a better future. You seem doomed to failure no matter what you do.

But, at any single moment you can choose to break that cycle by mentally creating a seal on each day. Resolve to shut out everything that has gone before today or will go after except that which relates to decisions that you must make today to prepare for your future. Live in the moment, make the best decisions that you can for today and be happy with that. Let tomorrows problems wait until tomorrow. Leave the past in the past. Do not even think about them.

Worry is what happens when the mind is aware of a potentially unpleasant thing and is focused on it but not focused on coming up with a solution.Take things one day at a time and worry will vaporize like magick.

Power up

The world constantly bombards us with data from every possible angle. First there is all the commercials on TV with all of the latest fashion trends for make-up and clothing, not to mention the shows themselves.Then there are  infomercials, health alerts as well as local and world news. Then in our personal lives we have all of the relationships both ours and the statuses of others. Finally on the internet there are things like email, Facebook and Twitter. With all of these things combined, we are always being hit with tons of raw information. Informative as most if it is, it is also mostly useless junk, that serves no purpose other then to clog up our minds and keep us distracted from our goals.

If we are going to focus our minds on any one specific goal, we get to learn how to tune most of the noise out and feed our heads what we want going into it. What you put into your mind determines what you get out of it. So while it may not be possible to shut everything out, you can streamline things. IF, like me, your goal is to constantly improve your life and the lives of those around you, then whenever possible, what goes into your head should be positive and uplifting. You should watch, read and listen to things that support your vision.

Do not watch hours a day of uneducational television. Instead of watching all of the depressing things going on in the news, watch inspirational movies like Pay It Forward, The Freedom Writers, Dead Poet Society, Gran Turino or The Pursuit of Happiness.

Read books by authors that have accomplished things that you want to do. If you are into sports read books that were written by successful professional athletes. If you aspire to be a world renowned chef, read books by people like Gordon Ramsey or Wolfgang Puck. Whether you want to be a motivational speaker or even just to improve conditions in your own life, read books written by people who have accomplished these goals, people like Les Brown, Bob Proctor, Jim Rohn and W D Wattles to name a few.

I personally do not watch much television, but I do love to read. And I have started reading works by authors that have made their life about self improvement and empowerment. The ideas in these books have caused some changes in the way I think about things and have caused me to look for ways that I can make more positive change in my life.

Earlier today I was thinking about the impact that music has on my life and realizing that I should make a list of empowering motivational songs and then put them together into a playlist. It took me about two hours of online searching, through lists of songs that other people had put together, to create a list of around 85 songs that I both like and find motivational and empowering. While doing this I noticed a couple of things that I found amusing. First, many people were suggesting the same songs. Second, due to my eclectic taste in music, many of the songs people were suggesting I already have on my hard drive. And I am sure when I go through my music to build the playlist the size will probably double. This playlist will help me focus on my goals and assist me in creating the future I want for myself and my family.

I challenge you to make these same choices in your life. If you do, I promise you will see a massive shift in your ability to focus on the things that matter to you.

What is written

In my last post we talked about how the stumbling blocks in our way give us an indication of how to go about making a plan to get what we want. Here and now we will be discussing something else that people often use as a limiting factor.

Your past. What has gone before. Your record. History. They are different words that all mean the same thing. It is the accumulation of things that we have done and that have been done to us right up until this very moment that have caused us to be where we are today.  But we are not the things that we have done.  I am sure that you have heard someone say that whoever they were talking about would never amount to anything due to their past record. They may have said things like that person is a screw up, always in trouble with the law. Stay away from them or they will take you down with them.
 
Many people that know me today, would either be surprised or have a hard time believing what I used to be like. I was an angry, angsty, bitter, frustrated wreck. I had anger management and self control issues, had frequent violent outbursts both verbal and physical. There were multiple instances of being on the wrong side of the law including theft, vandalism, property destruction and arson. I had frequent thoughts of both murder and suicide.

My life is not like that anymore. Nowadays, I am calm and peaceful in nearly every circumstance, even when things are not going my way. There are times where I get agitated, but nothing like before and my tendency is to not get upset in the first place about many things that used to drive me up the wall. Through experimentation and effort I have learned many constructive ways to vent the stress when I do get upset, so that it does not find its way to such destructive outlets.

If the sum total of my life were to be based on my past, then by all rights I should be in jail or dead. But why am I not? Because I did not use my past as a limiting factor. I did use it as a yardstick, but not for measuring where I would end up. Instead, I used it to take a measure of where I was. Then I asked myself if I was okay with being there. I found out that I was not and began to take steps to change things until I became happy with the results. First, I learned to control my emotional outbursts, which was a start but not enough. Then I learned how to not let others know whether or not they were pushing my buttons. And finally I learned to restructure the way I think so that less buttons exist and the ones that are there are much smaller and harder to find. It was at this point that I became happy with my results and focused on other issues.

The key here was that I used my past as a spring board or a starting point instead of a limiter. Just as the obstacles in yesterdays post paved the way for dreams coming true, my past was the first step in writing a new and better future for myself.

And if a simple demon/angel/alien/baby like me can do it so can you.