Tag Archives: creativity

Finding Our Family

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Finding family obliges us to discover who we are, what we believe about ourselves, and whether our childhood was the way we remember it.

We discover our family not in the way we believe. It’s not through our blood, it’s through the connections we make, the lives we touch and how we understand the things we can’t explain about ourselves.

The things which make us who we are not the things which make our family.

We become who we are though our life because of the people we meet and those which have a positive effect on who we eventually become.

Family are those people who create the will to be who we want to be, not those who want us to fit into a mold.

The discovery of who our family is sets us free because of the reasons of being the ones we are.

We should let no family member define who we are, what we want or whether we love ourselves.

The love we have for ourselves should be more important than the love we have for anyone else.

Finding the right family helps us decide who we are and what we want.

When we get to the end of our lives and see the family we have will we say I wish I’d have done this or that, or should we say, “I’m glad I have this family.”

You Can Do Anything, Remember That.

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What happens to our lives when we stop believing we can do anything?

We see things falling through the cracks. Our lives stare at us from under blackened covers.

We hide from the world within a shadow of the person we want to become, because we’re afraid that person will rock the boat, disturb the world around us, or that we’ll fail.

The shadow is the person we keep ourselves from being for many reasons, but what is it about doing our lives justice that keeps us from wanting the life we owe to ourselves?

The sudden jarring jolt of pain we get thinking about the crashing waves upon the shore of the land we want to live in keep us in hiding, they keep us from doing the creative things, the things which make us alive.

Our life feels under the control of a puppeteer. They pull one string, move one small piece and bam, we’re lost, screwed and destroyed.

When we cut the strings, taking away the feeling of the puppeteer, we find the life we’ve wanted all along, but in cutting those strings we risk ridicule for doing something harder than those around us.

They tell you its impossible, tell you you’re nothing and laugh at you for trying.

These are the people whom you once called friends, they mock you, and do things which, if they were your friends, they wouldn’t do.

The cracks in who we are only visible to us. We see the damage caused, we know the pain we’ve lived through. Those around us only see the shell, we know the person living in the shell.

Who we are isn’t as important as what we do.

Our life is nothing without the failure or without the boat moving through the currents.

We fail, but the important part of failure is we learn. Without learning from our failures nothing happens, we repeat.

The shadow keeping us from being ourselves is nothing but our fear telling us things are impossible, nothing is impossible.

You can do anything, remember that.

 

How TM Allows You to Take Control of Your Life.

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I’m four months on with TM and the main thing I’ve noticed is my ability to recognize myself.

Before TM I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted or whether I wanted anything, this includes to continue living.

I was in the darkest place I’ve ever been in my life, and that scared me enough to try something which some people I know saw as radical, Transcendental Meditation.

I’ve missed a couple of times, mostly because of conflicts with timing, airplane trips and being tired as hell.

Those times were when I noticed a difference, I’m not saying to stop doing it to see what I’m talking about, but I could tell the difference in my temperament and overall mood.

With TM I discovered who I am, what I want and where I want my life to be in a few years.

Before I was under the delusion that I could get myself out of any funk I got into, this includes depression, but I was wrong. My depression was the worst I’ve dealt with and because of that, I had to try TM.

In my first session I learned more about myself in those 20 minutes, than I had in the previous 38 years.

I found peace, for the first time in my life I felt like I could make myself better than I’d been before.

Along the way I’ve learned that focusing on myself, my writing and my family were more important than any distraction caused by my day job.

The delusions I had about my life before TM have been put into perspective as I didn’t know who I was or in what direction I was headed.

The delusion of our life is that it gets better without help, it rarely does.

I discovered my life is more than the person in the body, it’s about the way I want to help others, the things I want to teach others, like TM, and how I want those I care about to discover TM and its benefits.

TM has changed my views on life, family and creativity, but I know I’m on the correct path now, and that’s changed how I run my life instead of it running me.

TM allows you to take control of your life in a way you never thought possible.

 

Paperback Landmines, Barbwire and Flies

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The part about writing that always confuses, the writing.

We write, because, well…it’s what we do. There’s nothing I can see myself doing for the rest of my life, definitely not my day-job. I don’t want to be slinging drinks at 50.

I have books by King, Maass and one or two by K.M. Weiland, not to mention Strunk & White.

These books have gathered at my desk for an intervention.

They’re not in a pile, they merely litter my desk like paperback landmines.

One or two sit open, they’re pages alight in streams of fading sun filtering through the blinds.

I see a few of my notes about this, that or the other and find myself drunk from the new knowledge of outlines, plot and character dissection, which oddly sounds like some medieval torture.

I’ve never been fond of these books, but my writing, well it’s on the verge of discovering what landfill flies actually eat, don’t ask.

The headaches are back, the stress of not getting things on the page, when I desperately need the release.

The little synapses are firing, but there’s not much to fire into when the stories are stuck in a no man’s land surrounded by paperback landmines, gas canisters of regret and bullets made of that little gooey stuff that comes out of bugs when you squish them.

I see the books, they’re little bugs telling me to do things I don’t want to do. Outline, plot, character dissection and a myriad of other little things my heart doesn’t want, but my mind keeps telling me, “Listen up, it will help.”

My heart is torn between what my writing wants and what my mind knows needs to happen.

I’ve read all the books, done some of the exercises, but that doesn’t feel like enough tonight. The pillow calls, but I’d rather wrap it around my head with barbwire than leave the desk, because I’m a writer and I have to write.

The writing doesn’t come, it spurts and spills like fresh blood from an artery, cascading across the page in large arcs.

The arcs begin small, but then, something amazing happens…I begin to write.

Liking the Creature in the Mirror.

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Our lives, and our journey through our life finds us looking for where to turn, where to run and where we should be. This journey is oftentimes hard, but we go through it, our head in our hands, tears rolling down or a smile on our face, but it’s our decision which it is.

Going through the journey, we’re looking for something to grasp, something which attracts us and there are times which that something, which initially attracts, repels.

The act of being repelled by the journey sends us reeling and we have to get back up, stand on our feet and look in the mirror at the creature we’ve created.

The creature, though not who we wanted to be at the start of the journey, tells us who we are at that moment, and only at that moment.

The moment we get past that creature and on to another, we discover that we’re something better, not the creature in the mirror anymore, but the person we wanted to be all along.

The person we’ve become is a monster of different parts, taken from different aspects of who we are, who we’ve been and where we hope to be.

The person in the mirror is no longer one we don’t want to look at, it’s the one we take pride in, the one we tell our friends about and that person is the one we hoped to be at the beginning of our journey.

The journey is long, the road is filled with more bumps and divots than a 60-year-old freeway. We find ourselves going through new things each day, but at the end, when we look in the mirror at the creature staring back, is it the one you want to be, or the one you wish wasn’t there?

The creature is only where we are at that point, it changes, it moves and at the finality of the journey the creature becomes who we hoped to be.