In the end everything is alright...

Ohh the uncertainties of life...
Life is amazing and painful all at the same time, it comes with ups and downs, sometimes though it seems like there are more downs than ups and that is usually because it is in our nature to focus on the downs, because somehow we think that focusing on the downs we will be able to get the ups faster and be able to keep the ups around longer. I mean we are creatures that learn from their mistakes (usually if we are smart enough). Naturally when we burn ourselves for the first time we try to not do what we did the time we burned ourselves a second time. We learn from the mistake and by thinking about what we did wrong we in turn avoid getting hurt again.
But that's not how everything in life works. We live in a world where we are not in control of anything (I have written this before), we are at the mercy of not only our decisions but the decisions that others make. The idea that everything will be alright in the end is our idea of hope, it is the idea that even when we do make a mistake and we get burned eventually the burn will heal and we will grow new skin and then everything will be ok. It is our idea of faith, whether you believe it is the work of a supreme being or the work of just how things flow naturally in the universe.
Lately I've been repeating those words to myself because lately I have been feeling that everything is not going to be alright, that things are falling apart and because I can't see past a few steps from where I am standing and because I don't have a full picture of the puzzle of my life, I am not able to see the outcome of it, I can't see the how the pieces fit or what part of the picture they are making. And that is why we get anxious... Because we want to see the final picture, we want to see the puzzle put together, we want to rush it and not wait the time we need to wait in order to see it form, it is one of our greatest faults: our inability to be patient, especially after a period when everything was falling into place, or it seemed like it was and then something sudden changes and it either stops the flow for a little bit or some of the pieces that were given to you are taken away.
So what do we have then? All we can really do is hope... For me I have had to go back and see how my life has unfolded, from the moment I moved to this country, leaving the people I loved the most and that would always protect me no matter what and ending up with an abusive father who I thought I knew but it turned out I didn't.
Then I see myself ending up with a drug addicted husband, and ending up with a 9 month old baby living in a room with no phone, no internet, no way of communicating with anyone and at the mercy that my husband would not get too high so that he would remember that he had to come back and get us so we could eat because we also did not have food in our fridge...
I go back to all those times and I think to myself: hell I have been through a lot worse than what I am going through right now, and back then all I had to do was listen to that little voice inside which ended up guiding me to better things... I listened to that voice and I was able to get out of that room and was able to see my baby grow, and to keep her with me during those first years of live.
I remember when I had lost a job that was covering my expenses and how after I lost it I had no where to go, and then I remember when I worried the most all I had to do was try and keep quiet and just listen to the universe and the answer would be given to me right on time... That is how I found a different job, one that I needed at the time, I needed to work from home and I needed a salary and I needed benefits so I went to sleep and I said this is what I need... I kid you not the next day I woke up and I felt like searching for work at home jobs on Google, the very first company I saw, I had not seen ever before, I applied and got the job. Few weeks later I wanted to move to an apartment on my own, not just a rented room like we had at that point. And so I went where I felt I was being called to, I don't know why but I just followed that feeling, two months later I was moving into my very own apartment, it was not the best place in the world but it was ours.
6 months went by and I visited a different city, I had driven on a Friday all day after having little sleep the night before, I got to my hotel and totally passed out... The next morning I had this feeling that I needed to move at the end of my lease, not something I wanted to do at the time, not the city I wanted to move to eventually, and most definitely without having any money to move to a different city. So I said well, what will be will be... 6 months went by and I came to the city I am now living in again, somehow the money was there to travel and look for an apartment, I did not even know where it all came from, being a person that lives month to month like most people these days, I really had no idea how I was going to pull it off and even less of an idea of how I was going to pull off the move, one thing was spending money on going to look for an apartment, another thing was to actually spend money on moving.
After I applied for the apartment I got a call a few days later, I had gotten approved, the deposit that was needed for the apartment was less than what they originally told me it was going to be and as an added bonus it was exactly what I had additional in my bank account after I had paid all my bills that month. It somehow worked, I had no idea how but it did, and so I just went with it... Things just worked out, I had no idea and I still don't have the slightest idea as to why I am in this city... I have tried to figure it out, sometimes I thought it was because the schools are better than back where I was, other times I think is because of the people that I've met so far, other times I think it is because here is where I will be able to find one more piece to my puzzle or maybe a few more pieces, I really don't know, it made absolutely no sense and it still doesn't.
All I know is that for this moment this is where I have to be, ups and downs don't matter because every up gives you hope and every down somehow brings you to another up and to another piece of your puzzle, you just don't see it right now, because we can't see the destination yet, we are not there yet. Life is like traveling, you can only see a few miles ahead of you, sometimes you see that there is a bad storm ahead, because in the highway you can see the clouds at the distance and you think how you are going to have to drive through that and then you reach the storm and only go through a couple of miles of rain, but we could not see past that distance...
So here I am again, closing into a storm and worrying about it while I don't yet know if it is just a mile of it or if it is a few miles of it. Here I am worrying about how everything is turning even when I felt like it was not going to, when the ride was the smoothest, now I am hitting a lot of bumps and getting hurt and exhausted by them... But that's when I have to stop and I have to think about how life has worked out before, how I am still on the road and the road is not always bumpy, how I have to learn to separate the fear of not knowing the next thing that will happen with the hope of what I want at the moment and with what my goal or purpose in life is which in the end is the only thing that matters. What we want to achieve, that final picture, the one we are being given the puzzle pieces to, the one that will give us the greatest joy, that is all that matters and if we forget for one moment about that and we decide to focus on what we want at this moment in time, or how we want the bumps of the road completely gone we will end up taking a detour and finishing that puzzle will end up taking a lot longer than we expect.
Don't listen to the fear of the storm, don't worry about the little bumps, listen to your voice, is this right? where the directions that you took correct and this is part of the road to your greatest happiness or did you take a detour because you decided that what you wanted right now was more important this moment in time than your final destination? You always have the answer, it is not always logical but you always have it, don't let fear consume you, don't let it get the best of you and don't let it force you to immediate gratification because immediate gratification always ends quickly, it never lasts. Great things and great places take a long time to make and a long time to get to.

Cleaning out your life

I was having a conversation with a friend today, she was telling me about one of her little ones always saying that her grandmother who passed away a little bit ago was fixing her house and making it into a castle, this got me thinking...

Lately I've been asking myself why certain things have happened in my life and why it is that it takes so long for me to be able to reach certain "goals" I have set for myself and then I realized that in order for us to be able to get something new and amazing we first need to get rid of the old and dirty and then we have to clean out the dust left behind before we put something new in otherwise the new things will get dirty and won't last.

That's how our lives are, we are born into certain families, some people have great parents others have not so great parents and others have very abusive parents. As we grow older we start to accumulate an immense amount of friends, some are good some are not so good. Some of us have great siblings others have siblings that somehow even though they grew up with the same set of parents they ended up with a completely different moral compass than us.

And so it is, we keep growing and we keep dragging these people with us even though we know that they don't belong in our lives. Yes, most of the people we tend to drag along are family and close friends because society states that family should never be left behind and that family will always be there. We say things like: well he is my father, or well she is my mother, she is my sister, or I have known him or her since we were in diapers and that's why we accept whatever behavior they have towards us. This is not true, just because they are related to you, or because you've known them for a long time it does not mean they belong in your life...

Trust me I understand completely how that goes because I've done that; I carried on a member of my family and kept trying to make things work so that they could remain in my life and each time it seemed like things would be ok for a little while but then they would go back to the same way they were before and it was exhausting and hurtful because it was broken to the point of it not being able to be repaired.

So let's think about it... What is it that we are always asking for or complaining about? We all want to be happy, we all want to have peace of mind, we all want joy and we all want to have our version of success to come true. But how can we achieve that when we are dragging around all these other things that are of no use to us anymore? Or keeping around things that are damaged and that we are not able to fix? All these things that are basically anchoring us to the same place we are in now. 

Think of life as your house, your home, and all the people that you have grown up with are the things in it. As the years pass and we start to get new things we keep around the house only those things that we tend to use in our daily routines, because those things make it easier to deal with our day to day activities, sometimes the things that are not of good quality will break and we have to get rid of them because there is no way we can fix them, other times something of good quality will break but because it was of good quality we are able to fix it and keep using it for years to come. That's how relationships work, it does not matter who they are with, sometimes you have some that break and can never be fixed no matter what you do and other times you have some that you can fix and they continue to work for many years to come.
But how do we know which ones are the ones we can fix? Well it's exactly like looking at something that is no longer working, we always attempt to fix it first but after trying our best we get the same outcome, the thing just does not work, it won't turn on anymore... It is exactly the same with people, you try to have a healthy relationship with someone and you give them a second chance, you work hard to try and change what the other person is complaining about you but the other person does absolutely nothing to change their behavior. They continue to insult you, put you down and really all they keep causing is pain. They don't work, it does not matter who they are, they don't work and not to be harsh but what do you do with something that does not work and you are unable to fix? You throw it away and buy a new one... Granted you can't buy a new father or mother or sibling but you can certainly learn to surround yourself with better people and you can't do that while you are keeping yourself busy with the same old ones that keep trying to bring you down, while you are focused on fixing the un-fixable you are missing out on the great deals that the store of life is throwing at you.
And with that I realized how life is always trying to give us exactly what we want, what we ask for but we keep trying to go back to the same old stuff that does not work, that is extremely dirty and that we are not able to clean up anymore and that should be tossed away because we are so darn stubborn and think that we can find a way of making it work, but life keeps trying and trying to let us know it no longer works and you need to move on and we keep getting dirty and coming into our house and letting it get dirty after we have just clean it out... It's like buying your old stuff at your own garage sale.
There was a period in my life where I felt like I was losing people, I felt like hey I am all alone and have no friends, my family hates me, and all I got is myself and my kiddo who I have to protect and I kept trying to make it work with everyone that it had not worked before, because they were family, they were close friends, and it kept not working, it seemed like everything I really wanted was getting further and further away from me.
Then I started to see what I had asked for, I had asked for peace and happiness and while it hurt to not talk to certain members of my family, while it was painful to lose them because of their own behavior now I realize that is how life was giving me exactly what I was asking for, in order for me to have peace (basically a clean house) I needed to get rid of the old unusable dirty things or in this case the people that were causing me more pain and sorrow by putting me down and pointing out all the things I did bad, the people that could easily get angry at me and raise their hand at me, the people that had a completely different moral compass than me and that I just knew did not belong in my life because they did things in a way that I just would never accept.
It took some time, just like it takes time to clean your house after you get rid of that old couch and buy a new one, the marks of the old couch remain on the carpet for a few weeks, sometimes months until eventually after going through with the vacuum over and over and over they get cleaned out and they are no longer there, but it happened, and it's still happening.
Sometimes it feels like I have less friends than I did before or that life is keeping me alone for some reason but it's not that, life is getting rid of the old things that no longer work, the things that needed to be replaced and slowly giving me new ones to work on and enjoy. I've seen life surround me with not too many people but the people that life has given to me are some of the best human beings I have ever met, are people that think like me, people that truly care about others, it's like life is taking away all the useless and dirty little things and giving me bigger and better things to make my house even better than before.
When you see yourself "losing" friends, you see yourself losing a job, or going through something that you would call a major change, when you feel like there is absolute chaos and everything is falling apart, think about what you have to do to fix your house, think about what you do when you are cleaning your house, it gets messy at first, everything is all over the place, and then once we get rid of what is no longer useful to us there is a space left for something new, and sometimes it takes a long time to get something new to replace the old because once we clean out our house, once we fix it we don't want to add just anything in it, we want to put something more beautiful than what we had there before and it takes time to find that something. Sometimes we realize that we don't need anything else to fill the space and we end up keeping it as it is and sometimes after we have clean out the old dirty and broken stuff we end up finding wonderful things that we had not paid attention to because they were hidden by all the junk.
So lets do ourselves a favor and lets try to not complain when things are not going the way we want them to go in our life, lets not focus on trying to fix the things that should be thrown away, lets not keep the things that no longer work all they do is collect dust and hide the good things we have that we should be paying attention to or keep us from finding that new thing that will make our lives better, that would add beauty and flow to our lives, lets not try and get that which we have gotten out of our house that no longer works back, if we tried our hardest to make it work and it doesn't then it will still not work, no matter how hard we keep trying. And above all lets make sure that once we get rid of something that is not useful we take the time to clean up the space it leaves behind, because just like you would not put on new clean clothes without taking a shower first you also should never add a new thing to your house without cleaning the space the old unusable thing left first.

Relationships don't last now a days, but why?

And so I was going through my Facebook news feed a few moments ago and I saw an status update from a friend that said that relationships and marriages are a gamble in today's world, but see relationships are not a gamble it's just that the world has changed a heck of a lot in the past couple of hundred years and with that change we have also changed the way we view and the way we conduct our relationships.

A hundred years ago society saw divorce as the worst thing you could ever do, if you got married you had to stay married, no matter what, even 50 years ago women would refuse to get a divorce even if they knew their husbands had a pregnant mistress on the side, the mistress always remained a mistress and the poor child would grow up hidden in the shadows of the affair with the big "bastard" sign on their forehead (yes I know a few older couples that have been in that situation and their families just found out about the other woman and the child when the child turned 30 years old and now there was no use in hiding it anymore) Now a days we don't tolerate that, a woman is not going to remain married to a man that is cheating on her, she will divorce him and take half his money and move on, as painful as it will be for her. 

Then you have the other side, women cheating on men, that was something that rarely happened back 100 or even 50 years ago, but now it is a more common thing, women now are allowed to express themselves more freely, especially when it comes to our sexuality, back then we were not allowed to do that, sex was something that was very personal, very intimate, especially for a woman, it was not allowed to leave the bedroom of a husband and wife. Think about how sex is now, it is thrown in everyone's faces, you turn the TV on and there it is. This freedom helps create an image of a man that does not exist, and suddenly we start looking for it... And when you look for something you usually end up finding it.

Add social media and the way we communicate with everyone, we have the entire world at our fingertips, there are apps where you can find a girl or a guy that is within miles of you and you can ask them to meet up, just with the touch of a button, it's right there. It's so easy to find someone new and exciting to replace the old one. I mean how exciting is it to meet a new person? To learn about them, have a nice conversation with someone about what they like and what they don't like, all that usually lasts about two months, and after that you tend to not talk as much because well even though there is still a lot to learn from the other person, the excitement level goes down and so you feel like you have to look for someone new...

With that said, add now how we communicate with each other.  I have always said that the basis of any relationship is communication, there is no such thing as love first and everything else coming from it, the truth is you cannot love someone without knowing them (and if you are gonna say well what about the love of a mother for their child, well let me tell you something, a child is an extension of the mother so the mother already knows the child because they know themselves). A relationship, any relationship, first starts with communication, you talk, you learn about each other, but back then you had to do it either in person or by talking on the phone, there was no such thing as texting or email or social media, you actually had to be there. Your presence makes a big difference! Now a days we communicate how? a text here, a text there and I have said this before: have you ever gone back and read an entire conversation you had with someone over text and realized that you missed something the other person had texted because you were too busy typing your answer to the question they had sent before that one text you missed? Yeah, it happens a lot! not only that but you can never feel the emotion or read body language on a text, the best you are ever gonna get is a emoji trying to explain how the other person feels a that moment.

Let's keep going with this social media thing, (I am beginning to think this is possibly too long of a blog post but who cares, I am trying to get my point across haha!) because of social media now a days it is a heck of a lot easier for someone to pretend they are something they are not.  Because of social media it is a lot easier for someone to learn about another person without having to ask them about themselves, we live in a world that over shares everything, we live in a world where we see everything through the lens of a camera phone, we live in a world where everything you like on the internet can be easily seen by other people... And with that you now live in a world where someone who is your "friend" on Facebook can easily find things about yourself and pretend to like the same things you like only because they want to get you in bed. They can easily become the perfect person for you. (yes I know that is pretty scary but ohh so true!!!)

I am going to add one more thing to that social media over sharing... What do people do now a days when they have a problem? they post it on their social media profile. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ are all our outlets for relationship problems, we don't go and talk to the person about it anymore, we post it and wait for our friends to comment, and then we get that one friend that is the kind that likes to get involved in everything that always wants to give advice on how to deal with the relationship, or the guy or the girl who has been secretly waiting for you to have an issue with the person you are currently with just so that they can come in and tell you how they would NEVER do that to you! Again making it a heck of a lot easier to dump one and replace it with another. 

With all this I have just one more thing to add... there is one thing that human beings fear the most, we have an extreme fear of being alone, that fear is usually what gets us to pick the wrong person, that fear is what get us to jump into relationships too quickly, that fear is what does not allow us to maintain the relationship we have now. And because of how our society is changing, now a days we are even less accustomed to being alone and enjoying our solitude, the solitude we all need to get our thoughts together and figure out what we really want out of life.  We are always surrounded by someone, always in constant communication with someone that we don't listen to ourselves anymore and because of that our fear of being alone has increased tremendously and because of it more and more people rush into things, we don't take the time anymore to learn about the other person, to get the trust and the respect to grow like it should, to take it day by day and be friends first and see if that other person can be a good partner for you, to actually enjoy each other alone without the noise of the world telling you what is right and what is wrong for you. We don't take the time to show the other person who we really are because we are afraid that they might leave us if we do, so we go on pretending to be someone we are not until we become so unhappy that we can't pretend anymore, and I guess that's where the gamble comes into place, because at that point all you can do is hope that this other person falls in love with the real you and most times they don't so the fear of being left alone becomes true quicker than you thought...

That is why relationships don't last now a days, because the world has changed and we have forgotten the most basic things that make a relationship work. We have let ourselves get dragged into a world where we listen to everyone else but ourselves, where everyone else has the answer but not us, where we put on a screen in front of our faces and pretend we are someone we are not. We have gotten dragged into a make believe world where we have people telling us how you know when you have met the one? And we have forgotten that the only person that knows how they've met "the one" is you, because your "the one" is not the same "the one" for someone else. 

Love

It does not matter where I am or what I do, as long as you are with me nothing else matters...

True love inspires you to be better, to do better! True love means that no matter what you do, where you go, all you want is for another human being, the one you truly love, to be happy and as long as they are happy you will be happy.

True love is not jealous or controlling, true love is free, true love is what fuels the world, it is what gives hope to the masses, without it, I think we are all lost...

So don't ever regret loving someone with everything you've got and then having that person not do the same because when you look back if the love you had for them was true and pure then that time was probably the best time of your life, that time was probably the time when you got inspired to do better and because of that you became a better person so it does matter if you were never loved back the way you want it or hoped you still won something great! Just the mere fact that you were capable of loving purely and freely is enough to be thankful for, not many are capable of it and those who aren't will never experience the joy and inspiration that pure and true love brings, those people will never be as rich as those who have felt true love for another.