Ask Others About You

Just a quick piece of advice: Ask Others About You!

In your quest to know who you are and what you’re about, introspection is usually given the most weight. Your ability to reflect and ponder on the life you’ve had, your experiences throughout the day, and your emotions, is crucial to gaining any kind of self-knowledge that is helpful to you.

Unfortunately, we all suffer from a crippling dose of self-bias, that automatically adds 10 points to anything you do, to make it seem better, or less worse than it actually is.

My New Friend

He sat right next to me in class
I can’t believe I forgot him
Maybe the times I spent learning
Caused a temporary blinding.
Break times he never did too much
Unless in my games I was losing
He always seemed to be present at such times
And that presence was always brooding.

The Holy Grail of Human Fulfillment

I’ve heard many reasons for the wish to succeed. They can be broad or narrow, shallow or deep; whatever the case there are a multitude of motivations for one to do well whether financially, or emotionally. I’m sure you can identify with some of these examples I’ve heard recently:

• To have lots of money
• To have a comfortable life with my family
• To give my kids more opportunities
• To take part in activities I missed out on growing up
• A sense of security
• A nice house

The Tag Team of Purpose

Having a helping hand in life is vital to success. If there’s anything that is more and more true with every breath you take, is that you can’t make it to where you want to go without some help! In all honesty, “self-made” successes aren’t as frequent as we think they are. I’ve talked to many of these big-shots, and one thing rings true: they had help.

It’s never just about wanting something, much more plays out in aid or detriment to your future. (You might want to check out my post “Future Factors” for more on this) There are always more and more ‘players’ to consider in today when it comes to your life, making it so easy to be distracted. You must learn to prioritize these ‘players’ in your life really well. Some are completely dependant on you, others are outside of your control, but you can get them to work in your favour.

I’ve identified two players I believe you can prioritize as a team. I call them the Tag-Team of Purpose! Let’s name them and see how they work so well together.

Player 1: DECISION.

This is the player you control.  Another word you could you use here is choice. For any kind of progress to take place in your life, it should happen on the foundation of a decision. You decide what dream you go after; you decide which people stay or go in your life; you decide what skills you build. The power of decision is immense and sometimes – if not most times – taken for granted.

Some of us tend to live our lives like certain things are decided for us. Yes, to an extent you are exposed to situations that had nothing to do with you. You have no choice in what family you’re born into, or what economy you live in (this is supposing you cannot afford to move to a new place). Some of these things are not our choice. However, there aren’t as many of these as we think. You can decide what you put your energy into. You can decide which people to expose yourself to. Yes, there are elements of life we can’t control, but I’m talking about the ones we can. The books we read, the influences we have…all of these add up to our movement in purpose.

Decisions have this ability to branch off into more decisions. For me to decide on starting this blog ,for instance, I also had to decide what direction it would take, who I’d like to appeal to, how much time I spend on it, how often I post a blog, what times work best for me to focus on it, what negative effects I’m willing to endure (like the late nights) for the sake of the goals I have set, of which the goals are all separate decisions, and the deadlines for those goals, and I think you get the message.

In that last paragraph, I hope you realise that ALL those things were up to me! Nobody else. That was just about this blog. And let me tell you, this blog is a branch of OTHER decisions I have made about my life!

Yet sometimes, things happen to us, despite what we want or believe. These events also have a pretty cool ability, a ‘power’ if you will. Whether we like the events or not, they introduce the other half of out Tag-Team. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the ring:

Player 2: OPPORTUNITY!

Yes that pesky event has got another name. The tragedies and mishaps are actually a disguise. The people you’ve encountered are representatives of this member of Team Purpose… Opportunity.

May I present you with the idea that most if not all events that you experience are merely Opportunity in disguise! Yes, even some of the worst things that have ever happened to you, were opportunities for you. How do I know? Because I have heard this phrase almost a million times: “If I hadn’t gone through that, I wouldn’t know what I know now“. Have you ever said that? Or maybe this: “Even though [insert event here] was really hard, I’m now stronger because of it”.

Events and situations have the ability to morph our power of decision into something we call Response. What we experience is out of our control, but what that experience means is purely within the realm of our decision, and that resulting decision is what we term a response. How we respond, will be determined on how we perceive our experiences. This perception can change over time. For example, a tragic death in the family will lead to hurt, sorrow, sense of loss… Those are natural responses because our immediate perception is “this person is gone..what am I gonna do without them..My heart is broken..we all depended on them so much, where do we go now..?”. This is what you’ll go through (and probably much more) in your first thoughts of this event.

What could happen – and I say ‘could’, because it’s a choice – is that eventually you see this as an opportunity to grow. You choose to focus on the good memories, you choose to do positively in someone else’s life what you lost family member did in yours, you choose to remember the lessons you learnt, and even discover new lessons within those memories… Tragedy has turned to Opportunity! The event had nothing to do with you, it just kinda happened…and yet when Decision became response, you tagged in Opportunity. You chose to look at life’s events a certain way and let it be a benefit to you and not a hinderance!

So why do these two players work so well? I believe that you have massive potential to make brilliant decisions that lead you closer to your life’s purpose…but you need HELP. Opportunity provides you with that help, to make decisions that lead you closer to your goals.

In life, you can decide anything you want, but we’re not always aware of that ability, because we can be distracted by the events. In order to help us navigate these events, life presents us with Opportunities, to further decide how to move forward, to point us in the right direction. The people you meet bring opportunities, the places you go bring opportunities… It’s how you respond that makes the difference, and that response is a decision!

Will you decide to treat people better no matter who they are? One of them might be an angel in disguise, coming into your life with an opportunity. Can you stop blaming government or your parents for where you are? Whatever the case, you can still decide where you want to go.

That’s the Tag-Team of Purpose: Decision and Opportunity! They work well together, and can’t be separated!

Which team do you choose?

Over

Letting Go

If there is anything you will struggle with no matter how stable/rich/happy/wise you are, it’s ‘letting go’. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, a relationship gone sour, a divorce, the demise of a project you put everything into…this fact of life will haunt you without prejudice! It catches you by surprise sometimes like life carrying on as usual, then in a single moment your stability is swept away from you! Sometimes, it makes you suffer in the agony of knowing it will come like a close family member suffering from an illness for months before they pass away. Yet at other times it can taunt you like a pending decision from a court case in which you are the defendant. Whichever way it comes, the resulting reality is that it forcefully removes something/someone in your life that was part of what you became comfortable with.

That is exactly why it’s so hard, because we ‘settle in’ to people and environments and can’t imagine what it would be like without them. Literally, your mind will not have the imagination or the capacity to paint a reliable picture of what the experience would be like to carry on without that entity.

(N.B. when I say ‘imagine’ I’m also including the emotions, and thoughts that come with the reality you’re trying to picture. It is important to note this as you continue reading.)

Ladies, when he loves you and says “I can’t imagine my life without you”, he actually can’t! What he’s telling you is “I’ve got no clue what my heart would feel or how my everyday experience would be without your part in it. I’ve settled in the thought of you being present so much that it’s now an inextricable truth of my mind that you are here! I’m not so clever – or so heartless – that I could extract you mentally from my life, without coming to a mental block, a dark place that has no definition and doesn’t require one. If i put ‘without you’ into my life’s equation right now, my systems would crash!”

Ok, that was extremely soppy, but I think you get the message. And YES it works both ways too, in case any of you thought I was chauvinist. We can get so comfortable with family, friends, work environments, items of furniture, even TV programmes…to the extent that removing them is never a conscious option in our minds, and even if we tried, we’d hit that mental brick wall! Ten times out of ten! In some cases, it’s necessary to remove that entity, yet the brick wall stops us, refusing to let us see what the chances are that life could actually just…..go on. In some cases, you can’t stop the event from happening. People die. Economies change. Presidents come and go…well at least most of them. STUFF HAPPENS! Your control of life beyond yourself is at a permanent low. There will always be a loved one that passes on, or a friend that becomes distant, or a test you don’t score well in, or a job you’ll lose, or a series that’s cancelled (Heroes). Whether its one, a combination of, or all of these things, something will happen to you that disrupts your comfort. And it will be so hard because for better or for worse, because you can’t imagine life beyond what you’re comfortable with! You can maybe paint a picture, but you won’t easily recreate the experience in your mind. The brick wall is strong, it’s been there for millennia, causing anomalies of some kind in every life and every place.

People in abusive situations will stay after a while, because somewhere along the line, they could no longer imagine a life without abuse. The wall was put up, brick by brick, and so they settle in to a life of abuse, saying to it “I can’t imagine life without you!” Successful people become even more successful as they continue their lives, because a wall was built against failure. They look at success and say “I can’t imagine life without you!” Mediocre minds stay exactly where they are because they have become immune to the desires of success, or the depths  of failure. They are stuck in the middle, and they say to that existence, “I can’t imagine life without you!”

In fact, you’d be shocked at what your mind has settled with. Style of clothing, types of entertainment, genres of books (or none at all), colours, climates, sounds…..the list is endless. Your life has built its own mansion full of the people and things you’ve settled with! If just one item is missing, no matter how insignificant, life is just not the same anymore. Losing anything destroys your carefully crafted balance. That balance is what you and I know more commonly as our comfort zones. More on that in another blog. What I’m showing you is that with all these ‘comforts’, letting go of something is inevitable. Sometimes it’s good to let go where it is destructive, sometimes it’s bad for you where it’s helping…but all times, it’s hard! Literally you are letting go of a part of yourself, because you put that thing into your ‘mansion’, you decided which room it would sit in and who could see it. What’s worse, is you built that brick wall that protected it so well!

Letting go of someone you love, or of something you’ve created, will be one of the hardest things you’ll ever experience. Not only is there a brick wall, there’s the investment lost. This investment is everything (money, emotions, time, imagination…etc) you’ve put into the relationship or venture. It’s hard to let go because you also have to let go of all you put in. Time is a tough investment to let go of. Years can literally disappear before your eyes. Hope is an investment, that allows you to build expectations for something to happen a certain way. Letting go of all the plans you had, is also intensely hard, because those plans are what you chose, despite all the options you had. It’s hard to let go because it sometimes leaves you wondering “what was the point? All that time… All those emotions… All those plans… What was the point?”

An investment lost of any kind can lead to a type of regret, even if the circumstances surrounding the loss were impossible to avoid or predict. It’s easy to feel as though you would have been better off without putting in the investment. Let me give you a quote I once read:

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” – Dr. Seuss

Whatever comes to an end in your life, be grateful you had the experience. It’s easy to hold on. You don’t need anyone to teach you that. You breathe everyday of your life simply because your very biology is holding on to life. Holding on is almost reflex when you think about it. Even long after something’s over, we hold on by looking back to the past. There’s a way of doing this that appreciates the experience for what it taught you, or even to help others, but for the most part, we do this in the negative way. The way that makes us long for that place again. The latter method is unhealthy, and keep you stuck in the past. Here’s another interesting quote I read about this:

“One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.“ – Michael Cibenko

Wow! The future could run out on us? This shows me that if we don’t let go, the investment continues, we put time, emotions, and hopes into something that’s already gone! How stupid must THAT look from a spectator’s point of view? The thing about putting time into something, is that you can never get that time back! It’s NEVER coming back! All that time thinking, wishing, living like you’re unlucky, staying in depression…IT’S NEVER COMING BACK! You’re putting your money into a fake bank account, all that’s gonna happen is you’ll discover you’ve been cheated! Can I tell you something else? You’re the one that set up that bank account (Ouch! This is painful..!!).

Your experiences, once they have past, have only a few good uses…all of which revolve around educating you. If used wisely, being able to let go, and see the value in the lessons learnt more than the pain felt, you could become an immensely wise and insightful individual. Letting go allows you to redecorate your inner mansion, breathe new life into you, and bring back that sense of possibility and wonder.

You owe it to your future to let go!

By accepting a person or a dream into your heart, you made a choice that this was it. You settled, and left possibility outside. This is fine because we make choices. But when you lose something important to you, don’t be foolish and leave possibility outside still! Get out there and discover what your heart truly desires again. You might even need to build an entirely new mansion! That’s an exciting adventure, just waiting for you….

…waiting for you, to let go.

Over.

All Apparent But Still Secret

It has eluded me how life can be so full of mysteries and yet so full of discoveries everyday. You would think there was less and less to discover, but it seems we are still uncovering hints and signs of yet deeper understandings we can achieve. Does it ever end? I wonder about that. Will time allow it to end? I mean, will we see the ‘end of the world’ before or after the ‘end of discovery’?

I guess that’s one of those things we can think about, but the answer would be pointless on this side of eternity (yes, I believe in eternity). All we can do is live the life we have before us, and allow answers to come, to be sought after, to be stumbled upon, to be tried, or to be ignored. So many choices await us, with so many possibilities. The first choice is to actually engage your life will your eyes BOTH open! Everything you need is either inside you, or around you, but it takes something special to find most of what you’re looking for in your life. Let life be one full of discovery.

Apart from being the name of a channel I enjoy, the word ‘discovery’ in the sphere of law, is defined as the “compulsory disclosure of facts or documents”. That fascinates my mind to no end, because it gives me the expectation that life will ‘disclose’ all the necessary and desired opportunities I seek! And yet, we miss so much of it! The mind plays tricks on us, the heart betrays us, fear hinders us, and the opinions and mindsets of others often limit us. Our past, including upbringing and experiences, can dictate the lens through which we see life so easily. It gives us ‘blind spots’ that we have to learn to overcome or face dissatisfaction at many levels.

You should ask yourself “if all things are available, or apparent at the big-picture level, why then are they still secrets hidden from me?”

Well, part of the answer is good news: because the secrets of life – of your dreams, your hopes, all those things – were all meant to be discovered! This is a truth I believe in. Nothing is so far out of your reach that you will never know it or never see it. (Un)fortunately for most of us, it’s the other part of the answer that is also true: almost all your answers need YOU to actually go out and discover them yourself! That relationship won’t pop out of nowhere (unless it’s via a ‘singles’ website), the money won’t fall from the sky (unless a plane full of money that has no reason being in the air or even full of money, spontaneously explodes somewhere above you, and the money is organised in bound amounts so that its heavy enough to beat the wind that would otherwise blow the money everywhere). No, not even the hidden truths of what your situation really means are so obvious, but they’re there. Same with the relationship, it won’t just happen, but its possible. The money, isn’t readily available, but can be made. You see, all is apparent, but still hidden!

Over The Maze will bring some things to light that may otherwise have been concealed. Truth in this day is relative on many levels, though I do believe some things are quite static regardless of your feelings or emotions towards them. Gravity is something you can’t beat if you jump off a building and change your mind mid-trip. You WILL hit the ground. There are choices you can make, that will lead you down a particular path, with a particular destination. Once you are on that road, you can’t decide the destination, it was already decided the day that road was made. No matter how you feel about it, or what you think should be right, once you punch in my address into your GPS, it can only lead to MY ADDRESS… Not the Queen, not the U.S. president, not Burger King… Not even your mother! Only my house will be found at my address.

So think about what you’ve chosen to do, or the people you live life with. Maybe even the systems you find yourself in, like family or work. The nation you live in and its prevailing mindsets. Regardless of the climate, the truth is there for you to discover.

The reason I chose a treasure chest to typify what I’m trying to articulate, is because its right in front of you, but its contents are a mystery until you decide to open it.

Let the journey of discovery commence, and let’s demand that life discloses all documents and facts!

Over.