Tag: Finding your happy place

Who’s to blame when you waste your time? Why no one of course but you!

Often we look back and wonder where the time went. We next consider what we have done in the time that’s gone and we have serious lamentations for the time lost. But guess what, only you are to be blamed.

The time you lost is gone because you gave it away. Whether you stopped to hear and hold true the flowery words thrown at you or you took refuge from many imagined foes and monsters. Time lost can never be regained. Ground wasted can never be recaptured. So when you waste your time on things and people do not blame them. You chose to gift it to them and like any human being, no one is going to refuse a gift that brings them much. The prove of the pudding is in the doing and not the waiting; if you wait too long to exhale you may just lose the ability to breath. Waiting for a change or something new will not be fruitful, but doing something new or doing something to spark a change will.

In this season of new beginnings do not simply wait, but get up and do. smile more if you never use to smile much, say something even if get comes out all jumbled; practice makes perfect. You want a little more excitement in life, do something exciting and don’t wait on someone exciting – because they are doing what excites them and not you. They are living their best life while you are just watching. When the show is over all you will be left with is not your experience but your memory as a bystander.

Feeling as if you are not where you should be? Get up and go there; no one is responsible for taking you. No one is responsible for your happiness or contentment or what you qualify as success; only you. Do what you need to do now and not later (here many, many of us need this, myself included). You want others to take you seriously, well they only will if you start feeling about yourself and perceiving yourself as you want others to.

Step out of the dark and into the light, after all confined to the dark there is little potential for growth, to just breath.

Many have said but many also refute what the many have said, which is this: wealth, prestige, “power”, beauty and all those things we are told to strive for, do not matter. I mean, it may be easy to say this if you don’t have it – you can’t miss what you don’t have. Yet I have decided that this is true. You do not get your happiness from the things you have but who you have chosen to be.

Again, some will say they had no choice in being who they now are and give a fine sermon about how not having, this or that has determined whether or not they are successful. I will agree that being privileged can afford you more opportunities, but it does not mean that you are not blessed. It just means you have been blessed differently. a blessing is unmerited favor from God, while a privilege is given to you because you are within a specific group. The person who is able to smile despite brokenness, be kind in spite of having very little materially and compassionate in spite of all they have suffered or lost, is the person who is truly blessed.

Many of us fall into the trap of wanting to be defined, not by who we are, but by the group we want to be a part of. We are not content with speaking our truth and living that truth but we feel the need to deny the truth for a falsehood that will get us to the top. We become comfortable with being defined by what others make of us. We see blessings only if we are benefiting, only if we have something to gain. Our humanity slowly slips away when we refuse to share in the blessings we have received. That person or persons we see as less than we are can be a blessing in our lives. When we climb down from the pedestals we make for ourselves and really embrace everyone for being one of us because we are all the creation of a higher being, then our lives won’t be based on unmerited privilege but unmerited blessings.

There are many of us who think we have very little. But if we think about it we having been lying to ourselves. When we think about the fact that we have all that we need and a lot of what we wanted, then we will know we have been lying to ourselves. I have been told repeatedly the story of the man who felt sorry for himself, for always being poor, hungry and destitute. Who took a rope climbed a tree to kill himself and ate the last ripe banana he had. Ready to kill himself, he saw a man approach who happily ate the banana skin he had dropped. He decided not to kill himself. The man who had that ripe banana compared to the one who ate the skin was privileged and did not know it. There will always be someone in a worse position than we are. It is not just what I can gain but how can I help to uplift those who are on the ground looking up at me, or, looking across from me. We stumble when we start viewing others from the standard of our privilege and become blind to who they are and who we were called to be. Certainly not the accolades and wealth that we have or hope to attain but when we use our resources- limited or not – wisely,not only to our benefit but the benefit of others. And so we have to reevaluate our intentions by asking: what really matters?

So I leave with this verse for you to consider:

Let brotherly love continue. Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels. Remember the prisoners as if chained with them—those who are mistreated—since you yourselves are in the body also. But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.

Hebrews 13:1-3, 16

You are replaceable and this is good. Knowing that you are should greatly ease your mind. The idea of being replaceable is a big blow to many a egos. However, you should be good that you are. It doesn’t matter the relationship you have or your job knowing that you do not have to be a permanent fixture there can give you a feeling or sense of power and control over your life.

while no one wants to think that they are easily replaced the fact of the matter is we are. It is not that we don’t accept that people in general are, it is that we do not want to see ourselves in that light. Why you may ask? Because some of us may feel that being replaceable reflects a devaluing of our worth. But having such a view of being replaced will only limit our ability to see beyond our current situation, especially a situation we feel frustrated in. We need to accept that life goes on, with or without us. People will still, eat, sleep, laugh, grow and so on, without us there. That job that you find so hard to leave at work, will still get done, by someone else.

So where is the freedom in this?

You can stop worrying. No, things will not fall apart without you. In fact things may be better without you there.

People will survive, they will move on, and you don’t have to be there to see this happen. If you need to move on, then you can move on knowing this. In whatever capacity, you do not need to rage against the dying of a light , at the closing of a door , at the end of an era. It’s much better to know, once you leave, that you will be hard to replace more than staying and being stressed thinking you are irreplaceable.

You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it

G.H

It’s easy to run away from the plans God has for you; it’s easy to make excuses in living your purpose. Just decide to do nothing and nothing will happen; decide to fight tooth and nail to go the other way when everything and everyone is pushing you in the opposite direction. It is important to chart your own way but we must also know when the tide is against us. It is quite easy to spend your time being busy doing absolutely nothing. People see you busily on your way spending hours doing something and voila you have successfully convinced them and yourself that you are succeeding. Early to arrive and the last to leave must count for something right? You are unproblematic and you do what you are told, so it’s all systems go, right?

But one day you realize that all that you have done for you has been meaningless because you have not done one thing that you are passionate about. You look at other persons doing what you want to do and you say, “ah they are so brave” or the bitter ” they think they are better than every body. Well let me tell your wasted years has nothing to do with the next person and everything to do with you. You were the one who wasted our time on things that held little meaning and purpose. Things that you were not good at but that you felt compelled to do based on your own distorted view of your image and the intentions of God for your life.

The simple fact is, doing everything except what you need to do is a waste of time. Let us stop running away from what we should be doing when the writing is clearly there on the wall. No one is going to give us back the time we’ve lost an no one has time to mourn with us. The time to switch things around id now, not later when you have more courage or have secured ALL the tools you need; you may have to pick some up along the way. Do not ignore that voice that you try to silence with your noise of nothingness. Listen carefully to it, because you already know what it’s saying is true; you just don’t want to hear it. It is the truth that we often press pause on, because the fantasy is much easier to live through. But when it all goes up in smoke then you may be stuck in the belly of the whale. Most things in life don’t come easy and “you will never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice” – Bob Marley.

We all have a difficulty identifying our purpose, but it has always been within us to know. The problem is that what we realize we should be doing is not what we have told ourselves we want to do. The problem in living our purpose is that we find too many reasons to fail and fail to act. We accept the limitations imposed on us and forget that our seeming weakness is the very thing we need to find our way. Maybe like Simba in The Lion King we need to be reminded that we are more than we have become. Like Jeremiah ordained a prophet in his mother’s womb by God, we need to be reminded that we were meant for more than we see ourselves in the now. We need to stop thinking about failing, stop thinking about success as only material wealth and truly be willing to stick out in the crowd. Let us stop running from who we are and embrace our purpose which is to build and plant.

What I find interesting is that the people that follow your Twitters are called ‘followers’…

I have come to the conclusion that I don’t believe in role models.

It’s easy to get caught up in this seeming need to be influenced and be a “fan” and we are influenced by so many things that we are exposed to. Today we are exposed to certain people via social media and the rest of the mass media, because of their “successes”. They are presented to us as the exceptions among us ordinary mortals, as what we should aspire to be. Closer to home we may see persons who seem to be doing well and who seem to be just cruising through live and we think, “God why can’t that be me?”, or “what am I doing with my life?” There are some who have gotten so invested in the lives of those they “admire” to the point that they don’t really know what’s happening in their own lives. But many of us forget that these people we envy or “admire” are just that, people -human and therefore, fallible. We fail, in some cases because we have become so biased in how we see them and their lives, to realize that their lives are perceived qualities of life that are unattainable -it has been manufactured by them or by others for our consumption. We may become so hypnotized by the seeming success of others that we forget about our own dreams, languishing away on a forgotten shelf, and seek to emulate lives that are often times fake. While we hero-worship or are happily star-struck, our “business a spoil”.

We often times have a distorted view of the lives of those we seek to idolize and who they truly are. So we are not able to see the person for who they truly are because we are looking at them through tinted lenses and not the glaring light of reality. They then become a crutch or escape from the reality of our own “boring” or “uninspiring” lives. The truth is, you will never fully know ANYONE, no matter how close you are to them – and this is scary for most of us so we ignore this truth.

When you get caught up idolizing someone, what may also happen is that you pass up golden opportunities to improve your life because it does not align with what that person did or is doing. The fear of not having or being enough, may drive us to ruin because we try to attain the success that someone else has. Much like chasing shadows. We hang on and implement the advise that they give and their word becomes our manna and gospel and we become their disciples. We feel that we have to do what they did in order to feel good about ourselves and for people to respect and “value” us.

This does not bring growth and happiness into our lives.What it does is make our growth stunted, when we cannot see beyond that idol that has become larger than life. We become fanatics of things and people that become our gods; wasting time, energy and resources to build up and sustain a fantasy. The reality of who our idols are may be too much for many to handle when they are confronted with the truth.

Instead of seeking after idols, we need to find our own path and stick to it. We need to know what we want for ourselves and focus on achieving them. In essence you should never compromise who you were meant to be to make someone bigger than they are. We need to trust that our worth is independent of others and our value is immeasurable. We need to be confident in never losing sight of who we are and our place in this world; everyone fails, even those who are winners, even those who seem to have it all. What we do, especially to the people we idolize, is that we remove their humanity and ask them to fit into a mold that they do not have the capacity to fill – a round peg in a square hole. What we need are not idols or gods or role models but people who bring out the best in each other, who support each other and accept the good along with the bad. There is a danger in idol worshiping and having role models. Because of them we may end up trying to be something and someone we are not, and end up losing ourselves. This is one of the great tragedy of having idols. There is no reward in making gods of mortals and being led by the blind.

Your success is not determined by who you chose to follow but by the power that God has created you with. It is a power that is unique to each of us. No one can make you great,you were already born with that gift. All we need to do is to encourage each other to tap into its source.

How many of us when asked to do something that we do not want to do ultimately surrender to the dreaded, “yes”?

The Burden

“No” has always been a difficult word for me to use. It is a powerful word many of us are terrified to use in a world today that loves a “yes man”. I had been taught to be agreeable, obedient and reliable, therefore, “no” was a forgotten distant relative in my vocabulary. So, most of my life I have been saying “yes”. Yes to things I had no business saying yes to. Until yes became a word I hated but could not stop saying; much like an addict hooked on a drug that has become a burden too great to carry or a donkey that has finally met its match.

What’s Wrong with “Yes”?

Saying “yes” is also powerful. It can bring opportunities you never imagined and foster relationships that become unbreakable. However, saying “yes” can also destroy. It can destroy relationships when you cannot honor those promises you made, not because you wanted to but because you felt you had to do to remain on good terms with others. It can prove destructive when that thing or person that was at the center of your “yes” starts being something or someone that you resent and that promise becomes a bitter regret. Sometimes we are too desperate to be liked by others to be accepted and we are disingenuous because we are afraid of rejection. If the people we value really love us they will accept our “no” as final.

“No” is a Golden Nugget

No becomes most valuable when you realize that the time is not right and the opportunities are not for you and the only wise choice is to bravely say “no”. We all want to make our family or friends happy by agreeing with them and doing what makes them happy but, “no” can be the kindest way to prevent false expectations. We only defeat ourselves when we say yes when we don’t mean it; because, those three little words can cause great heartbreak when we cannot live up to it and life becomes a tragedy for all in our today because of our yes of yesterday.

So we need to stop and think, about giving honest answers even if people get upset with us. Let them be upset and disappointed today, so that your life does not become a comedy of errors because you could never say no. We should always ask ourselves this, “do I really want to do this?”. Do not rush into a situation without having all the details and questioning the truth presented as presented by others.When you say no never justify or give excuses for your answer. Hold tight to that “no” and never let it go.

Defense mechanisms protect us. Fortresses isolate us. And far too often we begin with the former and end up constructing the latter

― Craig D. Lounsbrough

Do you know someone everyone loves to hate? That person who can cause everyone to stop or change a conversation when they enter the room. That one person who can dampen any mood and kill your hopes faster than a chicken hawk can grab a chicken or a mongoose can run across the road (a Jamaican thing people). This person you may have heard referred to in passing or in a conversation you were a part of as being, “difficult to deal with” “party killer”, the B word, “can’t stand her or him” “disagreeable” and the list is endless and can be very nasty. For some of us there is a secret pleasure in tearing down that person (often times behind their backs), “because they deserve it”. And even if we do not contribute to the tear-down we support it vocally or silently; after all they deserve it for being so hard to get along with.

I am also sure that many of us will never see ourselves as being difficult to deal with in a way that can lead people to want to bring us down a size or two. But we may be surprised. The point is this, there are people who are always on the defensive and come across as truly difficult to be around or to have a conversation with. They don’t take criticism well because their ego is hanging by a thread and they try to mask their vulnerability behind a defensive attitude and a “heart of steel”. Many do not stop to consider that there could be a really sad story behind this vexation of a person, because it’s simpler often times to condemn (especially with the right encouragement), than to empathize and be a little more willing to look beyond the image they try to project.

There are many little events that add up to the big picture of who you become. Some of which can be so traumatic that if left unchecked lead to highly dysfunctional individuals – because trust me we are all a little or a lot dysfunctional – and be more enemy than friend. So maybe we need to be a little less harsh with our critique of the one or more persons who rub us the wrong way and get our defenses up. That person who always seems ready for a fight in the face even of a compliment. Maybe it is that they actually need a friend instead of an adversary; a hand up instead of a slap down.