Nightly Thoughts...

And I guess all we really need is one question to actually get us thinking, but it is always up to us whether we want to think about the question or just dismiss it and keep on going...

And so today after a long day I got a message from an old friend, a friend that had moved back to her home country when we were still teens and now time has passed, life has happened and she was wanting to know how things were going, she was a best friend during those high school years but time and growth have happened that it appears harder to have a conversation with any of them. As much as I love them and I am here to listen to them, the time that was not spend through the years just letting each other know what was going on seems to have caught up with us and the easiness in which we were able to strike a conversation is no longer there. 

Anyway... enough of that because I am sure everyone has gone through that at some point, you stop talking and communicating with someone and then suddenly you try again and all you get is small talk, something that most people are ok with but unfortunately I am not.  All in all my friend asked me why I had moved to the city I am living in now, why so far away from family and some friends that were left behind, it seemed incomprehensible to her that I would just go out on my own and find a new place when socially we all want to always be around people we love and that are familiar to us even if those are no good for us.

I sat here and just wondered how to answer her, no answer would have ever suffice to explain to her how I just really woke up one day and felt like this is where I needed to be and then went with it.  It has come to my attention how hard it is for people to understand the concept of going with your gut, of following your bliss, going where you feel you will be happy, whether that place is full of friends or not, whether there is family there or not, the place where your gut feeling is telling you to go is the place where you should be. 

Most people decide that they have to make everything fit for the purpose of making it logical right now, any move, any change in job; it all seems to be an issue of how much money will I make, how much family support will I have or how many more opportunities will arise from this move.  Life never seems to be about whether or not we will be happy doing what we are doing and the sad part is that now a days I find it not surprising when people look at me like I am a total weirdo because I just don't have a 5-year life plan that I am following.  

It is sad because life is not planned, it is also sad because when I say: "I am doing this because it gives me joy and while your offer of working in this company that has great benefits and great pay which will according to you allow me to buy all the things I (according to you) need, I would die working in a place I don't like, so I am sorry but I choose to be poor of money and rich in joy." I am looked at like a completely irrational person... I don't know when it was that life changed, I am sure that at one point human beings looked for joy rather than things and it was the amount of joy they had in their lives that measured their success and not the amount of things or the amount of money they had. 

But hey! I think I've written about this before right? Follow your bliss, you gut, your intuition... Lately in my own spiritual path I have been doing that more and more, and all I can say is that while it is extremely hard to let yourself be guided by something you don't quite understand, it has also been extremely rewarding and fulfilling.  I have learned a lot in the past few years and even recently, still learning to trust because as any other human being in this planet I want logic and I want everything to be connected at the moment I am doing things but life is not like that, life connects all the dots as you are living it. 

Last Sunday, another old friend contacted me (I guess one can say that there is something that needed reminding), this friend was one that I had worked with for a a few months a few years back, from a distance I have seen him achieve certain things in his life that anyone else would love to have, so far he has reached part of the potential I knew he had, just this gut feeling telling me hey that guy over there, he has the ability to be great! What kind of greatness he achieved was and will continue to be up to him.  So I am sitting there letting him know about how life is going (and this is one of those people with whom you can always talk and he will always listen, and it just makes you feel like hey it's all good and I get what you are saying, and that part of him has not changed) and he is letting me know how his life is going and then he stated how he had recently come to appreciate free time more, work was busy, managing people is harder than expected, things change when everything you and accomplish is not based only on your work but it's actually based on the performance of others. 

And so I said to him: This is why I do what I do, I might not have a lot of money, I might not have a brand new car, I might not have all the things that people say I should have to be happy, but I have joy, the only time I am not full of joy is when I am talking to people that are trying to tell me what to do. And so, I said, I have ended up with not too many friends and I have a hard time talking to people my age because they are all looking for that, they have graduated college, they want to get a good job, get married, buy a nice house, have kids and all that "good stuff" meanwhile I am here saying to myself, I tried that and life slapped me so hard when I went with what was supposed to be done and I was not happy, now, some of those folks my age have their good job, some have gotten a house and have the nice car, but the job they have is not something they really want to do and so here comes Friday and they are all getting ready to go out and party and go to the bar and get drunk because they just can't stand their job and they need a distraction (he was laughing while I was saying this and nodding, possibly because he is one of them) and I am at home saying to myself ohh I love my job I want to go and work some more and then that is what I do. 

But this concept is so hard for people to understand, it is not until they are about to die that they realize ohh I should have lived more and worked less, maybe my life would have been different if I would have not planned it so much and I would have done what I truly wanted not what would have given me more money.  It is so hard to understand that your fate is to die and that you don't know when that will happen but that whatever you do between now and then should be something that fills you with joy not with pain and regret.  That whatever you do right now is what counts and it is even a harder concept to accept that when you do the things you love the most then the money usually follows, it comes with it, you get good at what you love because you practice it daily without frowning at it, you love it so why wouldn't you do it? you want to work at it, you want to get better, it's not forced, and anything that is not forced and that is allowed to flow and is full of love it's always great! I don't think there is anyone that could tell me right now that anything that was created with love and passion is not a great thing. The energy it gives out is amazing and yet we refuse to do what we love and end up doing what we think we must. 

I've probably rambled enough tonight... point is though, follow your gut, your intuition, trust it, where you want to be right now, go there! Nothing is stopping you, life is about living it and doing what you love, when you do what you love you attract love.  Don't sit there and think that because parents have raised you to think that the goal of life is to acquire things so that you can have a safe retirement and no debt and blah blah blah, and that the only way to get that is to have a good job that your job might not be perfect but it's good as long as it pays well, mmm let me tell you something, those parents were about your age when they had you, and they are probably not at the end yet but just about to reach it, a period when everything changes and then the priorities change and then life is given a different meaning, time is more important because then it becomes quite clear that you don't have enough of it, and you look to spend that small amount you have left with the ones you love but we are busy being busy and so it is an endless vicious cycle, then death arrives and we regret the time that was not spent and the moments we missed.  And the flaw in all of this is that we all keep thinking that we will reach that age and that we will have time to do the things we do but we really don't, meanwhile we are missing out on the best things in life.  The song Cat's in the cradle by Harry Chapin puts this truth out there, but I guess it's just a song we sing until the time we actually decide to listen to it and get the meaning out of it. 

So, go do what you love, go where you want to go and don't worry about figuring it all out, even those who think that they've got it figured out are still trying to figure it all out, as one of my friends stated to me today: I will figure it out as I go along but I will be joyful along the way... 

On pain and suffering...

Woke up today to a message from one of my cousins, she had sent me the link to one of Kirk Cameron's documentaries, in the message she stated that it was a must watch and that she could not have said it better than the way he put it.
I decided to watch the one hour documentary which attempts to answer questions like: why do bad things happen to good people?, why doesn't God stop pain and suffering?, why there is death and sickness when there is supposedly a God that can stop all of it?, why doesn't God cure everyone?, and more questions among those lines.... eventually we get to the selfish question that every human being on this planet asks themselves when things are not going their way which is WHY ME?
Yes, yes I called you all selfish, the reality is that we all are, we are born that way because really when you think about it if we weren't we would not be able to survive, a baby wants food when it wants food and the baby cannot be told I am sorry you must wait because I have things to do, if you do that then the baby will cry bloody murder, why? Because the baby naturally and instinctively knows that it needs to eat in order to survive. However, as the years pass by we learn to not be as selfish, we learn to help others and we learn to love unconditionally, not love because we need something from another person but because it is a good feeling to just love. Now, some will argue that because we get a good feeling from loving then that also puts us in the selfish pile vs the non-selfish one, and yeah you can look at it that way but that is not something I will argue on this post.
So, I am sitting there watching this documentary and listening to Mr. Cameron pretty much recite the Bible, which he, as many Christians do, confuses the words written in them with the word of God. For the purpose of this particular post I am not go into a lot of arguments as to why that is not true but let me just say that:
1. The Bible was written by men, humans, let's say God did spoke to them and this is assuming God does exist (and I am not saying I don't believe God does) humans tend to interpret things and have the ability to change words to fit their own agenda.
2. Let's say that the words of the Bible are the words of God and God really did write this book, well the original one was written in a language that a lot of the people on earth do not understand and therefore it has had to be translated to many languages by many different people. In essence that book is merely a philosophical book which can give some answers to certain questions we as human posit that we have not been able to answer in any other way.

With that said... Let me continue...

Mr. Cameron starts with how the earth was created, how men were created, which as much as I like to go with what the Bible states and how God created this earth, there are just a lot of questions that are raised that the Bible does not explain, questions that each of us must answer on our own because really in the end all we can do is speculate. He tells us how Adam was supposed to protect Eve and how he failed in doing that because all he did was just watch Eve eat from the "forbidden" tree and did nothing to stop her, statements in which he seems to completely take the blame out of Eve and just put it on Adam. So, I guess it's Adam's fault we are all here living in misery right?
Well then he states how God, his God is all loving and forgiving, yet... God still kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and tells them now they will not live forever, on that note... even though God is all just, he also decides that it will not just be Adam and Eve that pay for their "wrong doing" (who would have thought that eating an apple would create such havoc) but every single human being will go ahead and have to pay for what they did.... Now that is like saying someone came to your door and killed someone you loved and then not only do we put away the person that committed the crime but we also condemn everyone else on this earth for the same crime even though they did not committed it. Now he does add that God is still just and caring and loving because he dresses Adam and Eve in animal fur when they become ashamed of being naked, later he adds that maybe it was God that said well you are acting like beasts (since they did not obey him) and now you will be dressed like ones... I understand that  that is Mr. Cameron's view but you can't have it both ways, someone so "perfect" as you seem to believe that God is cannot be both unforgiving and forgiving at the same time, you can be just and unjust, I mean really? Is this what they do when they talk about the Gospel?

He continues on with the story of Noah, and the Tower of Babel, and Abraham and as touching as it was to see him think about all of this because a family that seems to be close to him ended up losing their son to cancer after their child had been battling it for 10 years, he still is unable to really answer the question and instead most of the time he is just babbling about God and all the things he tried to do to make sure that we were taken care of and eventually lift ourselves to the heavens.

Here is the thing, when it comes to these kinds of questions of why does pain and suffering exist, unfortunately as much as we want to try and explain it with a collection of books written centuries ago, we really can't, the book tells stories about pain and suffering, most of which is caused by none other than us. Yes at the end Mr. Cameron states that we all have a purpose, one thing we have to fulfill, that life is a big theater production in which God is the Director, Producer, Screen Writer, etc... And we are mere actors, there is a philosophical text on this particular notion and it made a bit of sense especially since we really are not in control of our lives, everything we do is dependent on someone else, whether that someone else is someone closer to you or not, every decision you make in life, its outcome is not dependent just on you but on someone else because we don't live in this world alone.

So why does pain and suffering exist? We suffer because we want to, we suffer because we get attached to things, to people, suffering is a human emotion, pain is earthly not heavenly, we can say that God is not perfect because he created a world that is imperfect, so how can a perfect God create an imperfect world? A world full of suffering and pain? Change the view of the world you are seeing, the world itself is perfect, each of us was given the ability to choose and the ability to think and act the way we see it best, and each of us was created differently from one another therefore each of us will have different views and different ideas. It is because we are all created so differently that this world is not one bit of boring, we are here to learn and I agree that everything that we go through teaches us all a lesson each situation is different and therefore each lesson is different and yes I could sit here and talk all about what I have learned in the hope that you will learn it too and maybe live a happier life but if you are not willing to learn it by listening to someone else then if it is a lesson you must learn life itself or God will put you in a similar situation in order for you to learn your own lessons, some decide that they will learn others decide that they will not.

And going back to pain and suffering being an earthly thing... Have you ever just stepped back for a moment and really thought about all the other things that were going on in your life that were actually good? Life always sends good things to us, but as humans we are so self-destructive that when we see something good happening we believe we either don't deserve it or that suffering will eventually come from it and eventually it ends up happening because we expect it and then we find a reason to suffer. Whether it is that your job sucks, that you don't have enough money, that you are not healthy enough, that you might find out that you are going to have to battle a deadly disease (and on that note let me remind you all that life is deadly, we all end up in a grave eventually so saying deadly disease is kind of dumb) but we all always find something to complain about, something always sucks and when we focus on everything that sucks for us we tend to drown ourselves in this bubble of negativity which in turn clouds us and stops us from seeing the amazing things we have in life and we become ungrateful and intolerant of others and that in turn creates a lot of chaos in the world. It is not until the day that each of us starts to see life in a different way that pain and suffering will end, every single person on this planet must come to the acceptance that we are not alone and that we have to not just preach tolerance but practice it and I am sorry to tell you but not many people practice tolerance. And back to acceptance, we must accept that this world we live in, is perfect, a world where everyone would agree with everyone else would just be plain boring, a world where everyone was created equal would be extremely boring, a world where there were no "bad" things happening would be a depressing world because then how would we know what the happy and good things were? A world where sickness did not exist would not allow us to appreciate the times when we are healthy, those times that we often take for granted. A world where there was no death would not teach us to appreciate the moments we have now, even though most times we don't appreciate it and it tends to be the times when we completely stop appreciating those beautiful moments we have with close friends, family, nature that we get reminded that life is short and that death can come at any time so you might as well enjoy it.

Being Grateful

And so it happened that after being away from one of my social media websites I went in just to check on a message I had been sent and a wonderful friend had tagged me on a status, the idea was that he was nominating 3 people to write 3 things they are grateful for each day for 5 days.
And yes it did not mean I had to do it, but you know what I figured hey! It's a great idea and a great exercise especially since as humans we have the tendency to complain about things and look at them in such a negative perspective that we forget that some things we complain about we can change and the ones that we can't change are probably there as a lesson we must learn whether we want to or not, therefore it should not really be a big deal right?
As I started thinking about three things I was grateful for yesterday, I realized that I just kept adding to my list, there were not just three things I had in mind but several of them, and possibly this happens to me because I am just an avid thinker and if someone gets my mind started on something I just keep on going, so I figured I would make a slightly larger list and would actually make this list about things most people are rarely thankful for because they see those things as negative things and they tend to have a concept of a Utopian society that if existed would probably be extremely boring and in a way possibly depressing.
So here I go:

1. I am thankful for each person that has come into my life and intentionally hurt me somehow.
   Each of those persons, while they did some damage they also taught me a few lessons, lessons that had they not hurt me the way they did I would not have learned. Thanks to them I have learned how to spot good people, it was not easy but I learned there are certain things people who are out for themselves always do and say that those who are not don't do. Learning the difference has really helped me improved my life and taught me that it is not about how many people you have around but about the quality of the people you have around and when you get rid of the bad people, the ones that are left (even though they are not too many) make life even better! They have also taught me to be thankful for the few good people I have around, they made those people even more important and more valuable to me and that alone has increased the level of gratefulness towards those few good people, so much so that it seems I keep attracting them somehow and keep getting rid of the bad ones. 
2. I am thankful for sickness.
   Yes, why would anyone be thankful for that right? Well, let me tell you one thing about sickness... Anytime I've gotten sick it has been because I am working myself too much and I've learned that it is my body's way of saying "hello!!! you need to step back and relaxed a little" it is when I don't listen that things get worse. Today my little one woke up without a voice and coughing, I had a sore throat, the first thing I wanted to do (which is usually what the first thing most people do when they don't feel good) is complain, why ohh why am I getting sick and my daughter is getting sick after just one week of school and when I have so much stuff to do, meanwhile all I really want to do is go lay down in bed and sleep it off... Then it hit me, I needed to slow down a bit, she needed to slow down a bit, we both have been in this different way of living and just going along our lives on our own time throughout the summer and now we have to adjust to the schedule that is set not by us but by other people and the adjustment will take a little bit of time, and it's ok, it's ok to just take a small break, better to take a break than to get even sicker. Not only this but sickness reminds me of the times I am healthy and reminds me to enjoy those times even more, same when I hear about other people's sickness, it reminds me that it could be worse, it reminds me that I am not invincible, that I am a mere mortal and whether or not I feel like crap my job is to enjoy life as much as I can even when I am really not enjoy it much. 
3. I am thankful for the struggles that life has given me.
   Yep, I am definitely thankful for that, the struggles I've been through have taught me to see life in a different way. They have taught me how uncertain life is and therefore have allowed me to live a life where even if I plan certain things when things don't go as planned (and 99.9% of the time they really don't go as planned) I don't dwell on them too much while most people do, we want certainty in a world that is completely uncertain. We all want that, we want to be certain of things even though we know that there are no guarantees... ok there is one guarantee, you are guarantee to die, but you don't know when, where or how, everything else is not guaranteed, everything else depends not just on your decisions but on the decisions of billions of other people that live in this planet and are (I believe) connected to one another. So yes, I am thankful for life's struggles, they've taught me to live with less anger and less stress and to prioritize things in a way that most people don't.
4. I am thankful for death.
   Death is often seen as something so negative, especially when it happens to someone young and that has not "lived" to what most people would call a full life. The thing is that as I stated above, death is guaranteed for everyone, whether we believe it as a reality or not, the concept of someone dying and passing on is the same for everyone and it will happen to everyone. My acceptance of death and that it can come at any time reminds me to live life too, whether things are going great or they are not going so great, knowing and accepting that I can die at any time has made me see life in general and the life of others in a completely different way, a way that I've come to painfully realize that the majority of people (especially people my age) don't really accept because they are stuck on the believe and hope that they will be alive tomorrow and the next day and the day after for many many years to come. Some even create anxieties about dying and go about their lives worrying about the things they do that might kill them so instead of living they are pretty much dead before they actually die. The older generation though, most of them, and psychologically you get to the age when you accept that death will come and so that's when they actually start living each day, yes they have their complaints but they come to an understanding that life is limited and so they worry less about certain things like debts and actual things, but most tend to always go back and express with regret how much they wished they would not have put so much emphasis on those things back when they were my age because then their lives would  have been fuller. Even when you read about what is something that most people regret while they are dying it all comes down to the things that we as young adults believe we have to put so much emphasis on right now that we forget all the actual important things that we should be doing. 
5. I am thankful for debt.
   Yes, yes, WHAT? Most people want to get out of debt, they really just don't want to be in debt at all. But see we live in a society where we have been taught that we have to borrow money in order to buy certain things that we "must have" we get into extremes amount of debt, as students we use loans to pay our way through school, then we get out of school and we are worried about how the heck we will pay those loans. We complain about the loans, we complain about the car payment, we complain about the mortgage payment, the credit card bills... the list goes on. But what we don't realize is that for every single dollar we have ever borrowed we have actually acquired something we wanted at the particular point in time that we had acquire the debt, whether it was our education, or the new car or the house, but we wanted those things. Even if we say ohh hey I got debt for hospital bills, well you went to the hospital because you wanted to get healthy. Or I got into a lot of debt because things broke down in my house or my car, or some sort of natural disaster happened, still you wanted to fix those things that you originally wanted and with those things that you acquire comes a greater sense of responsibility because now you have more things to take care of. Anyway... to my point, debt has taught me to live a simpler life. There was a point in my life where I could walk into any store and I would get a huge credit line because I made enough money and I had excellent credit, but then shit happened and everything was lost in a manner of days, it all went to hell so I was forced to live a simpler life. The simpler life is not a life that most of the people around me are ok with and therefore is a constant battle to get them to stop telling me that I need this or I need that but... It has been worth it to me, and had it not been for debt and the complains of others about their debt, I would not be able to live simply and work towards memories rather than work for things. It really is freeing when you think about it. 
6. I am grateful for injustice.
   Yes, yes, I might be completely insane on that one, how can one be grateful for that right? Well... Let me tell you something, without injustice I would not know or enjoy those times when something just happens. And even though in my view of things each person has a slightly different concept of what justice is and the "reality" is that deep down we all have a collective concept of what justice is, and that concept changes as we evolve as a society which is why most times we can't even define what justice is, we tend to give examples of what it is, but we would not have those examples if we did not have examples of injustice.

So there... I am sure there are more things I could think about that most people would want to completely get rid of and do without because hey, they are not so good things for them and therefore would never think about being grateful for them but there is always something that those things teach us and the lessons we learn are part of the life we are living right now and one should never be ungrateful of the lessons we learn. In the end that is what we are here for, to learn, and the more that we fight the learning experiences the more we will be put in situations where we will be forced to learn those lessons, the harder we will make our lives and the more grateful you are for the things that happen to you the more positive you will begin to see your life...