You hold back your own opportunity for growth (personally and professionally) by focusing on whatever negative you think is/allow to be your limitation.
Problems and complications occur in life on a daily basis – financial, emotional, physical, mental, work related, personal, direct or indirect, expected or unexpected. However it appears it introduces unwanted difficulties and the feeling of being thrown a step or two back in your progress.
You are walking down the street to an important meeting that starts in a short amount of time. Suddenly, the sidewalk is closed and the bordering street is a high-volume, high–speed traffic thruway that you cannot cross and now you are going to be late. Where do you go/what do you do? Do you curse poor city-planning about the lack of forewarning? Do you suddenly panic/tress about the time-constraint?
Life does not come screeching or crashing to a stop at that moment. While the road block may put a strain on things, it is not the ultimate end – you have/there are options. You may have to reroute your plans, re-time your estimate, reconfigure strategies or reevaluate methodologies, but the options are there to keep moving forward.
When you only see the problem and it’s directly-related disturbances, it’s much easier to feel out of control of the situation, or yourself, and lose focus of the options you have and what you can do next .
Don’t focus your sight on the problem – focus on seeing a solution/way around the problem and in turn, keep stepping ahead.
To understand how big your picture is, see and understand how small it is in the actual big picture.
Today’s WEDNESDAY WISDOM message is multi-layered thinker of a message. I am sure many will see it as a check on ego, and while it is, it is also about understanding and recognizing your own self-importance and our role together in life for survival.
As a people, we have become accustomed to the “rich vs poor,” “upper vs. middle vs. lower class,” “male vs female,” “gay vs straight,” “race vs race,” etc. way of separatism. Yet, in reality we all need each other.
While the rich may own the corporations, who are the ones that actually run the day-to-day operations?
While you may not like a certain group of people, you may want to check where many of your day to day living commodities came from – clothing, food, arts and even the very words you speak.
Your ego may allow you to think you are better than the next “common person” – the homeless, the restaurant busser, the custodian, the gardener, the garbage person, the intern, a colleague…anyone who is perceived to earn less than you or live a life you deem less desirable than yours. Your position of money, power or education does not negate anyone else’s. We all start the same from birth – an empty shell canvas. While some may have environmental factors that supplement(ed) their life more than others, we all live life the same, by experiencing, learning and developing into our own life experiences. You never now which of someone else’s experiences will benefit you in your time of need.
And yes, this applies to us within our individual and collective roles of eco-responsibility.
Let’s stop the us versus them/the world mentality – It is not you against the world. It is all of us together.
Man AND man.
Man AND animal.
Man AND nature.
Sometimes we believe we are on top of the chain and can survive without the others. Truth is, we are one in every capacity, for our individual and our collective future. We all have our use, we all have our role, we all have our place.
Take away your opinion – now what do you really know?
So many times beliefs or ideologies of how things are going or supposed to be are used to predicate how things actually are or used as facts and pushed onto others as such.
Everyone is entitled to have an opinion but, everyone has the responsibility of knowing their opinion does not a truth make, no matter how strong each opposing sides’ beliefs are. Using the statement, “Well, I believe…” or “In my opinion…” to substantiate a statement or argument does not increase the level of truth or fact behind what is being said.
What you think does not equate to what you actually know.
Recently a friend asked me, “What’s the meaning of life?”
My answer, “To Live.”
When you live you feel.
When you feel you experience.
When you experience you learn.
When you learn you understand.
When you understand you can choose/decide.
You decide in which direction your next step in life goes – do you continue to live or do you allow fear and doubt to take-over your life and remain stagnant/stuck?
The choice, as always, is yours but, I say – Live long and prosper.
It’s doesn’t matter how many people are in your life; What matters is how you affect the number of people in your life.
I have repeatedly said to friends that “social media” has become the death of true social interaction. People today, youth and adults alike, are more concerned with their sense of self importance – how many likes or follows does my picture garner – and increasingly less concerned with actual social interact and the affect on the real world around them. Popularity is trumping perseverance – It’s more about “me” and “my benefit” than concern for the collective well-being.
Take a second and ponder the following: When you are dead and gone and the popularity fades, how will you be remembered? WILL you be remembered?
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou
As I have said before, whether it’s ONE person or ONE MILLION, what’s your contribution – what will your lasting legacy be?
If your reaction to someone else is in the form of extensive negativity or hate, readdress and reanalyze the situation. Chances are you are the cause of the problem, not them.
Do we all have to like each other? No. Shit happens and sometimes you feel you (or a loved one) were wronged thus providing the choice and opportunity to move on from further interaction with the offending party. The choice in how to proceed from moving on is always yours to make. Many choose to act or remain civil towards each other; it’s when you don’t choose to be civil, the problem is an internal problem, not about them. What does anyone get out of you hating so much?
The same applies to a person whom you have never met yet have an unstaggering bias towards.
Take away any personal political, religious or racial biases while self-exploring your choice(s) via the following questions within a purely civil living context:
What about their presence/existence bothers you so much?
In what way has/does their actions affect(ed) your life to cause you to react so vile towards them?
How does your continued indulgence in hateful interrelation better your own life/existence?
We all have different background, different stories, different experiences. Live life with an open intent: interact with others and experience different situations from different perspectives, allow yourself to feel all the feelings, learn what works for you and what doesn’t, let go of what you don’t like and move on. Don’t allow yourself to continue to be [part of] the problem by perpetuating negativity and hate towards something or someone that has no affect on your life. Heal yourself from the darkness of such hatred and negativity, and in doing so heal the world and make it a better place. For you, and for me, and the entire human race because we are the ONLY race and species destroying ourselves via useless, worthless, unfounded, unchecked uneducated, self-proclamatingego boosting bigotry and stupidity.
Check yourself before you wreck not only yourself, but the rest of us and the whole world along with you.
Do something nice for yourself by doing something nice for someone else.
Whether it’s holding a door, offering a seat, notifying of a dropped article or even offering a smile or an unexpected laugh, there is no denying an internal uplifting of self in seeing your actions uplift someone else.
There’s a slight messiah complex in us all in knowing that we were able to help someone out. Slightly egotistical, but that necessarily doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Feed your positive endorphin rush by supplying someone else a little positive energy in their day. They will remember that moment and that feeling, possibly tell someone else about it and furthermore, pass it on.
Changing the world starts one person at time. Start with yourself and in turn help change someone else.
Don’t let someone else, or their actions, affect the way you live your life.
Relationships come in a variety of forms: from family to significant others, friendships to collegial, personal to informal and even present or past. At some point, something will happen in the form of a conflict where a distance is put between you and another person and it is this point in the relationship I want to discuss.
What happens often is you begin to edit your life to “avoid” the other party. You don’t patron a restaurant, a bar, a concert,you don’t attend a social hangout with friends or even a family event in order to not interact with the other person. But, who is really suffering – the person who is not in your sight, or the person you have allowed yourself to become. A person hiding from their own life.
Yes, it may be “easier” to not see that person, but as previously mentioned, sometimes the easy path isn’t always the best path for you. But, how many shared moments will occur that you will not partake before you feel comfortable/like you again? How many shared memories do you not get to experience before you allow yourself to be free/like you again? And on the contrary, how many of those things will the others in your life not get to experience with you either, of which some may be their own personal moments they wanted to share with you? If that person is there, ignore them. You are there for yourself and whoever you choose to be with in the moment, not the person drowning you in [sometimes your own] negativity.
No one can make you feel what you don’t want to.
No one can make you (inter)act like yo don’t want to.
No one can make you live like you don’t want to.
Find the solace and peace within yourself in choosing to be in control of your own emotions. Find the power and self-confidence in choosing to be in control of what you want to do, where you want to do it, when you want to do it and who you want to do it with. Take full control of your life.
Live your life for you, not anyone else – the choice is always yours.
No matter what the struggle, no matter what the situation, don’t allow yourself to get so caught up in your own head that you inadvertently create your own void of solitude and shut yourself off from the rest of the world, spiraling further down your own black hole.
How many times has this conversation happened (typically when things are at or on the verge of a tipping point):
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Oh, I didn’t want to burden you with my mess…”
No matter how big or small your burden and no matter how near or far the person, someone is always just a phone call away.
A burden is best beared (borne) when it is shared.
Author’s Note:
Before we get into this weeks inspiration, I would like to apologize for my delayed posting. It has been over a month since my last post, but not for lack of inspiration. I’ve had this on my mind since the beginning of April yet couldn’t figure out how to properly word it to present. Because of that, it didn’t feel right to post something in it’s place just to have something to post – this message had to be said first and had to be said right.
Through a series of events, I came across some pieces of inspiration that were presented to me that helped me solidify what I wanted to say. There is A LOT going on in the world today and from all angles, what you think you know isn’t always the final truth of the matter. It’s more than just a difference of opinion – there is a difference between having knowledge and actually understanding.
Sending love, light and positivity energy with inspiration, motivation and education. Help spread it.
–IAMGAMBLE
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Sometimes you have to unlearn what you were taught, to rethink what you really know to gain the knowledge to begin to truly understand the world around you.
From education to religion, to politics, laws and morals, what we know to be “truths” have many times been merely compositions, teachings and implementations of someone else’s belief systems. How many times have you (over)heard a parent say, “Because I said so…” or heard (of) a teacher telling a student to “Stop asking so many questions…” You are taught to be individualistic but when you think or act differently you are brought back to be a conformed unit. Our system of teaching is just that, a system – a standard to hold everybody to altogether although, every person does not hold up to the same standards.
Example: Not too much more than 50years ago, children were being punished in various forms (including corporal punishment to psychological pressures) for being LEFT-HANDED until they learned to write RIGHT-handed. Why? Because, LEFT-handed was the WRONG WAY to do things during that time, partially based off historical religious condemnation of left-handers, accusing them of being in cahoots with the devil, a sign of perversity and even grounds for a woman being labeled and executed for being a witch. To this day, many essential tools for living are crafted by right-handed people for use by right-handed people, intentional or not.
There will be things that question your beliefs. When it happens, work to be less oppressive and defensive and work to be more accepting and pensive.
What you believe to be morally true may not hold the same moral truth for someone else.
What you believe to be religiously true may not hold the same religion truth for someone else.
What you believe to be historically true may not hold the same historic truth for someone else.
When presented, try to comprehend that other side of truth, which often times can/will lead to compassion and a greater understanding of each other as individuals and a race of people as a whole. As I have said before, my purpose of this blog is not get people to think LIKE me, but to inspire people to think differently about the way they interact with people, situations presented and ideologies about and surrounding themselves.
I AM GAMBLE 