A Short Love Letter

I love you, I don't say it lightly... I really do love you.  I find myself thinking about how you are doing every day, every night.  I find myself wanting to tell you all the good things that happened in a day.  I find myself wanting to talk to you about anything and everything.  And then I remember that you decided to not be part of that.  I remember that there are things you must work on.  I remember how you feel and it hurts.  It hurts because I know you are hurting, it hurts because all I want is for you to be truly happy and I know that you are not.  It hurts because I can still see us working through all the crap that life can throw at us and be successful.  It hurts because I wish you could see yourself through my eyes, then maybe you could see that you are not alone.  It hurts because you are in a place where you can't see it.  It hurts because I know that you hurt that you have not had the right people around you for a long time.  It hurts because I know that you know I wouldn't just leave, I would stay, but because of the things you have done in the past you feel you are not worthy of such love.
When I say I love you, I mean I am here for you.  I mean I am not going anywhere.  I mean that I don't really care how hard things get, I will stick it out.  I mean I won't abandon you, I mean I won't judge you.  I mean I will forgive you, do my best to understand you.  I mean I am not going anywhere.  I wish you would see that, I wish you would stop punishing yourself.  I wish you would realize that we all make mistakes and that we can all learn from them.  I wish you would care about you just as much as I care, then you would know that you don't need to self-punish.  Then you would know to not put yourself in situations that make you feel worse.  Then you would value yourself enough to go towards what you really want.
I love you and I wish you loved yourself just a tiny bit of what I love you.  I wish you would understand what love truly is and would start to cherish it more.  I have already forgiven you, I wish you would forgive yourself too and give yourself another chance.  I love you and I wish you loved yourself too.

FedEx fucking sucks, when incompetence goes way too far...

I seriously can't make this up, after today I am seriously questioning how the fuck is a company like FedEx still in fucking business!!!
A package was ordered on April 3rd, 2015.  Said package was expected to arrive on April 8th, 2015 by 10:30am.  The arrival time was very specific, usually with carriers you see that the time of delivery is by the end of the day on a particular date. This morning I decided to check the FeDex website to see where the package was and if it was in fact on route to my house.  Their tracking system showed the package in Memphis, TN.  The package's final destination is Charlotte, NC.
I went ahead and I called FedEx and asked them where the package was, the response I got from their international department (package was coming from China) was that there were issues with customs and customs did not release the package on time, but now the package was released from customs and it was in a warehouse in Tennessee waiting to be transferred to cargo so that it could be shipped to Charlotte.
I asked when it was released from customs and the lady said it was released yesterday at 5pm.  I told her ok so it would be in cargo sometime this morning and it should be here tomorrow, she said yes it should be there tomorrow.  I said can you assure me that my package is going to be here tomorrow, she said well I cannot assure you of that because anything can happen and then she added: "the plane might not work and that might delay your package even more."
I said: So, you are telling me that the plane might not work and you don't have a different one that you can put the package on? She said: well, the package is waiting to be transferred to cargo so that it can be shipped to the final destination.  I said: Why is it just sitting there waiting? It was supposed to be express delivered and it's not like customs has it so it should be on its way to my house right now.
She had no answer for me other than no one should have promised the package today since anything can happen with the cargo and the plane might not work so the package would have been delayed even more.
I seriously cannot make this up and this is not where the story ends.  The tracking on the FedEx website says the package is in transit to Japan. So I called them again this afternoon.  The lady that answered me in the international customer service department said: Your package seems to be having issues with customs, and it is still in China.  I said: the lady that I spoke to at 9am this morning said that the package was in Memphis and that customs had released said package so it was just waiting on a warehouse to be transferred to cargo and it would be shipped to me so long as the airplane was working.  Cause I am guessing FedEx, only has one fucking cargo airplane that flies from TN to NC.
The lady said ohh no, it looks like your packages are in Anchorage, AK you are expecting two packages right? I said: No, I am expecting only one! She says: Ohh yes yes, it is in Anchorage and the representative you spoke to earlier should have started a trace  to see where the package is, that is when I told her that since the representative that I spoke with in the morning did not do her job and she seemed to have no idea what the hell was going on, to transfer me to a supervisor.
Exact wordings she used after I said that: "It seems like a trace for this package should have been opened this morning and since that did not happen this issue will have to be escalated to a supervisor, would you like me to transfer you to one?"
This is the part where you want to be able to reach through the damn phone and start strangling some sense into people... Finally I get the supervisor on the line, and the supervisor says to me: It looks like your packages are on their way to China from Japan, you are expecting two packages correct? I said: no, it is only one! He tried to fix that whole situation and said: ohh yes yes I was reading wrong, but your package is on its way to China from Japan.  I had to ask how the fucking hell did my package get to Japan, I mean one thing would have been for them to have accidentally sent it back to China right but the package had been in Memphis, then in Anchorage and then in Memphis again and from Memphis the package was sent to Japan, and now there was no estimated delivery time.
I don't know which one was the idiot that said it but at some point I heard: Well, the good news is that it did make it to the USA! Well, you fucking morons!!!! That it made it to the USA helps me fucking none because the package is no where in the USA...
Supervisor said he was going to finally open the trace and investigate where the package was so that I could get an estimated time of arrival, and that someone will be contacting me within 2 hours to let me know what is going on.
I got a call 45 minutes later and it seems like the more you fucking move up the chain of command of the Federal Express corporation the more incompetent they seem to get.  I asked where was my package, yet again... Ma'am your package is in China.  It somehow went to Japan and then back to China.  I said: are you going to tell me when the package will arrive here, cause it is not supposed to be in China, and could you explain to me how the package came to Memphis, and then went to Anchorage and went from Anchorage to Memphis and from Memphis it went to Japan and from Japan you are telling me that now China has it?  She said yes, it seems to have been human error and there is not much we can do about that.  I said so my package is in China now, she said: well we are waiting for China to open so that we can ask where the package is.  So you really don't know where my package is and you are telling me that you've lost it due to human error. She immediately tried to rephrase that, of course I did not let her.
So here is the bottom line:

1. A package was ordered, said package was being shipped from China to Charlotte, NC.
2. Said package made it from China to Memphis, TN in one day, the tracking of it (picture attached to this post) states that customs released the package.
3.  Package was then sent to Anchorage, AK. For those that do not know geography (like some of the people that work for FedEx), Anchorage, AK is on the opposite side of Charlotte, NC.
4. From there, the package was sent back to Memphis, TN to be shipped over to Japan.
5. From Japan it appears to be in transit to China and now we have to wait for China to open (because I guess China is close for business at the moment, even though it was 7am in China when I got the call from FedEx) in order to find if the package is actually there.
6. At this point, FedEx does not want to state that the package is actually fucking lost and they don't have the slightest fucking idea as to where the darn package is.
7.  For a company that only focuses on delivering packages all over the fucking world saying that this is fucking human error and counting it as just one fucking human error not the 4 different errors made while handling said package is beyond fucking unbelievable!!! This is not human error, this is fucking incompetence! Specially when handling a package that has a priority tag attached to it.  The damn post office does a better job than FedEx!!! That is saying something!!!!
9. The excuse that the airplane might not work and therefore it would delay my package a day or two, went out the fucking window when their tracking system states that the package had travel from one end of the country to another and then traveled to a different continent where it was not supposed to ever be in the first place, only to travel back to the original place... Looks like their fucking airplane (because it appears that they only have one) is working perfectly fine!
8. We have to give them credit for something, I mean they were even proud of the fact that the package had made it to the United States at some point, congratu-fucking-lations!!!

For such a huge company to have this mishaps happen so fucking often, is beyond unacceptable, they charge an extreme amount of money to deliver packages and they cannot even do their job right... This is not the first time this happens either, a while ago I had a package that was paid to be delivered on Saturday and said package was sent out within the United States and it was not even a great distance that the package was supposed to travel... Said package was delivered Monday afternoon, not even Monday first thing in the morning... Monday afternoon!!!!  That is the level of incompetence that this company has and in all this mess they cannot even admit the fact that they screwed up and they did it big time!!! All they can say is sorry for the inconvenience, you will receive your package soon... and what the hell do they mean by soon? Well apparently it means whenever the fuck they find it...

Life and faith...

I have not actually sat here and blogged about anything lately, life has been as hectic as it can get and more annoying than ever. 

It's kind of hard to get yourself together when you have so many people around you that are counting on you, that see you as something that you don't really feel you are at the moment. 

It is even more annoying not having the time to actually heal from past wounds and at the same time have new ones being caused on you. 

It can be extremely hard finding yourself as the person everyone needs to go to for advice and yet not feeling like you are able to put your things together. 

Some say life is messy, it is possible though that we make it messy.  It is possible that as we go through life we busy ourselves with so many things and then forget that there are things that needed more of our attention. 

Other times we want to trust people, give them a second chance because a part of you felt like that was the right thing to do, and then those people turn around and do what they did before but three times worse than before.  Then life gets messy, but it was not messy, it got messy because you trusted and unfortunately you cannot go through life with distrust. We all need to have some level of trust of others, but unfortunately even when we trust the bare minimum we can still get hurt, we can get burned.

I can always count on my good friend karma to come to the rescue when things like that happen to me, when people that are given a second chance just completely turn around and mess up again, when I make life messy because I keep on trusting and giving the second chances.

And when that happens, when that blow comes towards you, it is easy to distrust, to lose faith and to thing that life is messy, that is not that life is made messy but people but that it is naturally messy. It's hard to remind ourselves that human beings are the ones that are naturally selfish and that because of that they tend to make this life messy. That our own selfishness is what causes us to not live in peace and tolerance of others, because it is our selfishness that makes us stubborn and unwilling to see when we have made a mistake. 

But life is is about having faith that even when you have created a mess or someone has brought mess into your life that as long as you leave that selfish part of you to the side that you will be able to see how life has a way of cleaning things up and making them right, rather than making them even messier. 

It takes a while to see it, it takes a while to start to trust again in something bigger, something you cannot see or have proof of its existence, some people don't even get there, but I think that if we just put our trust in humans, just in ourselves... The ones that are constantly making mistakes and that half the time don't even know what the hell they want. Those who hurt with words and actions, the ones that come in to your life to hurt you and then leave, the ones who say they will do certain things and then either do the opposite or do nothing at all and end up breaking promises. 

Why would I ever trust in people, in the selfishness of people? There are very few that are not like that and those are really hard to find, I wish they weren't but keeping to themselves is the only way they won't get as hurt. 

Those that are not as selfish are the loners, the ones that don't ask for anything when they help others, the ones that don't want the glory after helping someone, the ones that don't throw it in their faces after having helped someone... They are hard to find because they don't fit in the world we live in, it is easier for them to get hurt because they want to see the good in people.  Eventually they tend to close themselves up and not say much, the war against the ones that hurt turns into a pointless thing, it becomes a waste of energy because the reality is that there are more selfish people than there are unselfish ones. 

So I trust and have faith that there is something greater than humans, that there is one thing that we don't understand or see, that helps those who have been intentionally and undeservingly hurt. Maybe it does not really exist, maybe because I can't find proof I am irrational in believing in it but we are all irrational. We believe in someone we don't know only because they have a title, we believe in pictures even though they can be easily manipulated, we believe and trust in our family because we think that they will always have our best interest at heart.  All of it is irrational, we have no reason to trust, we don't know if they are lying or not, we never know if they are plotting something, we don't know their intentions, we can never really know who they are, yet we trust in them only because we can see them.

So why not trust in something that is all good and that has our best interest at its hands even when we don't see that what has happened is actually good for us at the moment that it happens.  Why not create it? why not just believe in its existence and give myself some hope that all of it has a purpose, because if it doesn't have one then why do it? 

I wish people were different, I wish that everyone could live in peace and harmony. I wish there were less bad and more good done for everyone's sake, but that is something I might not get to see in this particular plane of existence, all I can really do is change myself and accept that I can't change the world.

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.

Mistakes

I guess everyone has had someone hurt them in their lives, one way or another people are bound to hurt you sometime and you are bound to hurt some people sometimes... whether it is a boyfriend, a parent, a husband, girlfriend, wife, child, family member or friend, there will always be someone that will hurt you.

It's the sad truth, the sad reality, one we all must deal with... So how do we deal with it? There are people that will come into our lives and hurt us more than others, some will cause us greater pain just because we never expect them or we are taught that we should never expect them to hurt us.

Earlier I wrote on Facebook how we are never the same after we make a mistake or someone makes a mistake with us, I used a painted piece of wood as a metaphor: you paint the wood, start writing letters on it and make a mistake so them you have the choice of painting over it or sanding the mistake down and starting over, either way the wood is never the same and either way it takes time and effort to fix the mistake. See if you paint over the wood the mistake is under that paint, it's covered but it's still there and if you don't paint over it enough the shadow will always follow; on the other hand, if you sand it down you will have marks of the sand paper over the wood, no matter how hard you try the marks will remain there and it also takes a lot of effort and lots of patience...

So does fixing a relationship, it takes effort, it takes patience but most of all it takes two people to come to an agreement that the same mistake will not be repeated and to actually make the commitment that the mistake won't be repeated, then you can sand down and afterwards create something better, something stronger and more beautiful!

But what happens when the other person is unwilling to sand down the mistake? To paint over it enough to hide it and forget about it because with time it will be covered with something beautiful, then should you go ahead and spend time trying to fix that piece of wood? You shouldn't, you can't force someone to forget, to create new and better memories, sometimes people come into out lives just so that we learn a lesson, sometimes those people are someone we had one of the best relationships with and that's why it hurts us most when we have to let them go, especially if we made the mistake that hurt them and they are unwilling or unable to give a second chance... Then it is ok to go find a new piece of wood and create something better with it, not making the same mistake you made before and being grateful that you could learn from the past one.

What if you come to an agreement with this other person and apologies are given all around but after a while the person makes the same mistake again? Basically they created something beautiful only to throw an ugly color of paint over it after a while... Do you then try to fix that piece of wood again or do you walk away from it? Is it then fixable? Is it worth it? Maybe it is, but most likely it is not... A person that is given a second chance and ends up making the same mistake again is a person that is unwilling to change, so no matter how much you sand down the wood, how much you paint over it again, it will take more effort, more strength to build something better and more beautiful, and after it is built if the other person has not changed they will ruin it again... So it's best to walk away because at that point they've confused a second chance with the acceptance of bad behavior, and you should never accept bad behavior. 

What about this: what about a person hurts you but they never apologize? What if they think that what they did was correct, if they think it was correct then there is no need to apologize, even when you tell them that they've hurt you they blame you for it... At some point if you are very close to this person you start to believe it and then you try and work on sanding down the wood, on painting over it but since the other person does not think they made a mistake they keep throwing the ugly paint over the wood and then what? Should you keep working on making the wood beautiful? No, you shouldn't. This is also accepting bad behavior and a relationship will never be good if one person just accepts the bad behavior of the other because at one point this person will end up breaking the wood to the point of it being unfixable, and after the wood is broken they will break you! And you are like a piece of glass, if it is broken and you try to glue it together it's never the same... However, you can always pick up the pieces melt them together and make a better you, once you've walked away from those that only know how to break things.

With all the examples above, when you find that you can't save the relationship, when you find it that it is not worth creating something new, or that you tried to do so but couldn't, you will also find yourself broken in millions of little pieces like when a glass breaks, because every time we can't fix a relationship with someone we love we get broken. But if we have the courage, if we find the strength and the patience to pick up all those little pieces, melt them up and make something better, make ourselves better it is then that we have not really lost because when we can transform pain into a positive thing, when we use it as a drive to become better ourselves rather than use it as a force to stop us from keeping going then we have won something that very few have learned: the power of self-transformation, the power to rise from the ashes and not let our past mistakes define us and with that we earn the power to attract good to us because the better we become, the more we convert pain into something positive the more we will attract people that do just that and what a gift that can be! So don't ever feel bad for those pieces of wood that couldn't be fixed, learn from them and become a better you! And with those that you are able to fix and create something more beautiful, cherish those! They don't come along very often, those are the ones that will continue to become more and more beautiful as time goes by, those are the second chances that make life worth it, that fill life with hope and you can't never go wrong with something that fills you with hope!