A test of courage

Today I want to talk about the past. Most people tend to look at their past deeds and either use them to bolster themselves up or to hold themselves back. Think about it.

There's the guy who thinks he is better than everyone else because of who he used to be in high school. He was the letter wearing football star and he's still lording it over everyone within earshot about how he is better than them. Look he even has proof! There's his signed mvp ball. And he was homecoming king. Or how about the local chess champion? He's smarter and more important than you because of that one tournament that nobody thought he was going to win.

Or how about the girl who was the head cheerleader? She's prettier and better than everyone else, yes even you and again she has proof. Look at all her trophies. She was uncontested queen of the "in" crowd and acts as if she still is.

And what about all the other guys and gals, the ones who were just middle of the road and didn't accomplish anything great while the others were busy being superstars? A lot of those people look at their lack of accomplishments and beat themselves up about it. They point at their past deeds and say, see I've not done anything of note yet and nor am I ever likely to.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am here to say that that is complete bullshit. All of it. What makes me say this? There is a card named A Stout Heart, that is part of the Legends of the Five Rings card game that I'd like to quote. It says " The only true test of courage is the last one."

See the L5R card game is about samurai protecting their clans and their empire from evil. Think about it. If a man stands up against evil five times in a row he is labeled courageous and maybe even a hero. But when evil comes around the sixth time, if he runs and hides then he is labeled a coward.

What a man has done in the past gives an indication of how he is likely to act in the future. But it is not your actions in the past that determine what kind of person you are, just as it is not the actions you intend to take in the future. It is your actions in the present that determine who you are and what kind of person you are.Maybe you made the wrong choices in the past. But every now is filled with new opportunities to make better choices.

You are not the same person you were twenty or even ten years ago. The person that had those massive successes or massive failures no longer exists. You are a completely different person with different abilities and different limitations. Don't look to your past to see what is possible for you.

Except as a source of colorful stories about the way things used to be and maybe as learning experiences, ignore the past.  Create a new now that matches your goals and ideals and never look back.

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

Nostalgia is killing your dreams

Is there an event or series of events in your life that you find yourself often reminiscing over, whether by yourself or with your friends? You probably find yourself saying that "remember when?" and "those were the days"

We tend to have nostalgia about good times in our past. But whether you realize it or not, there is a good chance that that very thing is hurting your chances of success in the future. Now before you disagree, realize that I think that great memories of the past are a good thing.  It is just the attitude we tend to take about our current times that are killing us.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't it always seem like what we are really saying is those were the good old days and now they are gone and this is what we are left with? We used to be great. Life used to be awesome. Wonderful things used to happen to us. We are fond of the lives we used to live and dread the one we have now.

Why not use the glory days of our past as a template for the future? Sure we can never go back to exactly the way things were before, but certainly they can be better than they are now right? What circumstances made life so much better then? Did life really change all that much? Or is it simply how we look at things that changed?

If what changed is that we became jaded and beaten down by negative experiences with life, through good will and conscious effort we can repair our damaged hearts and minds. If it is circumstance that made life better then we can find ways of changing our circumstance to be more like what used to be. Again, it can never be exactly like it was. But, there is no reason why life cannot be just as good or better than it was at the highest point in our past.

Just because we accomplished something great once does not mean we are done. We have within us near infinite potential if only we are willing to work for it. We can go on accomplishing great things every day for as long as we live. Our past accomplishments just serve to show definitively the least of what we can do and have already done. We can do so much more. The only limits that exist for us are those that we place upon ourselves or those that we allow other people to place upon us.

Stop looking at your past as the pinnacle of your life and everything afterwards as the long inevitable downhill ride. Instead take stock of the things you have already done and point out how each thing has pushed your limits that much further than they were before and enabled you to know and do more. Resolve to use past victories as the momentum, the fuel if you will, to push you on to future victories.

Never give up. Never surrender. Live each and every day as if it were your last and strive to be as far ahead of the pack as you can so that you are an example for others to follow. But, more importantly, be an example for yourself to follow.

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.

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.