Tag Archives: Family

Living The Gift of The Cosmos

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Whatever future, whatever past, each day brings us to the very last.

We see our life, but detest the idea of our death. We wait until the very moment, or near the moment, we’re going to die to make amends.

This ability is purely human.

Does a bird tell the bug sorry for eating it, no. Will the parent of a turtle long-buried in the beach, be sorry for leaving its children on the beach, possibly, but humans are the only creature that is truly sorry for things its done, but we don’t say sorry, and mean it, as much as we should.

Our lives are gasps of air in the middle of a cosmos of gasps. We see the stars overhead, but don’t think about the life we’re living, or how it affects the people around us, not to mention the environment.

Our gasps or air are stories in a cosmos of stories. Our lives, deaths and eventual rebirths, are nothing short of miraculous in a cosmos which pays no mind to person in Africa starving, or to the person in America who is doing the same thing.

The difference between the two is the ability to change the way things are.

We see the stories and the little gasps after they’ve happened, but the problem is, we never understand the reasons for our life, or for why we’re here.

We live in a life where the world changes faster than it has at any other point in history, but we never stop to look around, never think about doing things to help those around us, and oftentimes, we don’t think about those we hurt.

Our little gasps are just that, breaths of air escaping through tubes and chambers underneath our skin, but the act of breathing is something we don’t control, it occurs for us without thinking about it.

In a cosmos full of extraordinary things, we still don’t think about what each breath means or what each day is.

In our world, our life is lived day-to-day, but we don’t think about our life as what encompasses it.

Get through the gasps and stare into the cosmos and see your life for what it is, a gift from the creation of the universe.

Ignoring Fear and Living

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Whatever future, whatever past, each day brings us to our very last.

These words are something which ran through my head the other day during meditation. I’m not sure where they came from. Maybe I tapped into something which was screaming to be heard, or my mind thought, “let’s screw with him”.

It’s possibly the first and not the latter, but neither would be surprising.

Our future is there in front of us, yelling at us, telling us we can do amazing things, if we’d just do them and quit stalling or being afraid, but fear is always what keeps us from doing things.

Fear drives us to commit horrible crimes and fear creates people who otherwise wouldn’t be heard if not for their fear.

Stealing away from fear, our lives are our own. They are run by us, and only us. We do the things we want, because fear has less hold on us than anything else, but the fear is always there, it’s just hidden away.

Our past may not be the way we wanted it to be, no ones never truly is, but it’s there to learn from, to destroy the fear residing inside and chase the demons of our past into the night.

The night holds fear, but only for those who fear it. There are many things to fear in our world, none of them are truly about fear, more about we believe fear to be.

Fear is that heartbeat in the bottom of your throat, the gasping for air in pool and lies we’ve told.

Our fear, our past and our future are nothing but what we make them out to be. They stand by waiting to be called into battle, but there is little we can do until the battle call is heard.

Fear keeps us from fulfilling who we should be, and not who others believe we are.

Fear disrupts, causes chaos and changes our very subtle rhythm in our hearts, There is nothing more controlling about fear, than the pain of fear.

This pain causes things to wear us down. Take our mind from us and causes us to question who we are, or who we want to be.

The fear of our lives is under our control, how we control it determines how we live our lives, or if we live our lives.

We fall through our lives, waiting for the very last, living in fear of that last day.

We should ignore the fear of our last day until it arrives and then only at that moment when our last gasp comes out will we know that our fear of death meant nothing.

5 Things which can change your life and how they changed mine.

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For most of my life, I’ve lived in the shallow end. I did only what I needed, I wouldn’t rock the boat and I never wanted to do the things which made me happy, I always did things which made those around me happy, or things I believed would make them proud.

Living that way taught me a few things:

  1. You can’t make others happy, regardless of how hard you try.
  2. You must to what makes you happy, to hell with everyone else.
  3. Your immediate family (which for me is my wife, kids and dog) are the ones who will support you no matter what.
  4. What you choose to do creatively can be the most important thing in your life and will give you more guidance than any book, speech of movie.
  5. You must find peace within yourself to do anything worthwhile creatively.

These five are the biggest things I’ve dealt with in my life and I’m going to go through them and tell you how I discovered the importance of each.

For Number One.

My biological dad has been out of my life for most of my adult life, this is a mutual thing and though I’ve tried and he’s tried, we can’t reach a point where we are amicable to each other.

When I was a kid I played soccer because my parents wanted me to, I was 4 and had no choice. When I was six, I started playing ice hockey, and though initially I did it because of my parents, I began to love the game and watching hockey, especially playoff hockey is a part of who I am today.

In my teens and toward my senior year in high school I wanted to do something which would make my dad proud, I enlisted in the Marines, and was discharged after failing tests in receiving.

I started college because I wanted to make him proud and it was my best way out of a bad situation, I failed at that too, completing only a year with poor academics.

When I moved to Las Vegas it was because I had no place to live as my biological dad and step-mom asked me to leave because of my relationship with my then girlfriend and present wife. Along with their not being happy with my relationship and my academics I left with my sister for Las Vegas, my girlfriend followed me to Vegas a month later.

I began writing again in 2001 after insistence from a friend and encouragement from my wife.

Initially I did because I wanted my dad again to be proud of me being published, but that never happened. After a reconciliation after my son’s birth in 2004 and eventual falling out, we didn’t talk until around 2009 when my daughter was born. That reconciliation like the previous one, didn’t end well and I’ve moved on.

I learned that my biological dad will never be satisfied with anything I do and the only person I should make proud of my achievements is myself.

For Number Two.

Along with the falling out I had with my biological dad, my sisters and a few other parts of the family stopped talking to me.

This taught a great lesson: Your family will not be there when you need them, and you must do only which satisfies yourself and ignore what everyone says about you.

I’ve since reconnected with my sisters and those other parts of my family and they are some of my greatest supports now. I don’t know how I could have dealt with my grandfather’s funeral without all of them!

For Number Three.

When others gave up on me for falsehoods they were told, my wife stood by me, and without her by my side the last sixteen years, I’m not sure I could have handled everything as well as I have.

For Number Four.

When I began writing again, I read books, watched documentaries and began following creatively gifted people on social media. I learned they are as clueless as the rest of us when it comes to how they got published or why they’re successful in their art.

Neil Gaiman said it best in his commencement speech, “Sometimes people get hired, because they get hired.” Which is the best example of how artists, writers and actors make it in their fields.

Neil Gaiman and others worry that they’ve perpetrated to some crime in their success and worry that their will come a time when someone will show up and take everything away.

I choose to write for myself, not because doing it for anyone else didn’t give me the results I wanted, but because I like to see the stories which come out and I enjoy coming up with the ideas, characters and worlds which come out so wonderfully on the page.

For Number Five.

Through all the things I’ve dealt with in my life, my parents divorce when I was eight, going to 11 different school and having to adjust to each, being discharged from the Marines, family giving up on me and being estranged from my biological dad, I no longer carry any resentment toward my family, my biological dad or anyone else.

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I learned this year that dwelling on anything never helps and that meditation and living for yourself and doing the things which matter to you are the most important things you can do in your life.

Your life is your own, no one else can live your life, no one can write your stories.

Your entitled to the life you want, and don’t let anyone, anyone tell you different.

Having Greater Life Expectations

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In modern time we see our life as a series of pictures our birth: birthdays, school, college, marriage, kids and we see the way its gone.

What about the expectations we had for our life when we started?

Where have the things gone we wanted to do, the life we wanted to live, the books we wanted to write?

Having expectations for our life is something which makes us who we are. We have dreams, goals and desires.

Each expectation is a bigger deal than the last.

We’re expected to do what our parents want us to do with our lives, but what if we want to do other things, what if we want to be a creative, be a writer, artist or actor?

Where does being a creative fit into the grand scheme of what society wants for us, regardless of our wants?

I hated college, I went only because it was my way out of a bad situation and in hindsight, I wish I wouldn’t have gone to college, I’d rather have spent my time, and my dad’s money writing, but I’m not sure he and my step-mother would have gone along with that idea.

I’ve always wanted more for myself than I felt my parents did.

I didn’t want to go to college, I wanted to be a Marine, when that fell through, I had nothing to fall back on.

I thought about traveling the world, working jobs to keep myself alive, there are times I wish I would have lived up to my own great expectations of who I wanted to be, but I lived life safely. I didn’t want to upset the relationships I’d built with my parents, I wish I’d been more like the person I am now, more willing to adventure than to do what I was told.

Now I’m more willing to take chances and risks. I’ve always felt I wasn’t allowed to be who I wanted; that there were restrictions, that I couldn’t be this that or the other. One of the things I felt my dad looked down on was creativity. Which, sorry to say, has always been my strong suit.

Twenty years ago I was afraid to be myself, afraid to take what I wanted to do and turn it into something else, something more like the life I wanted for myself.

I don’t regret my life or the choices I’ve made. Those choices are what led me to be a dad, husband and the experiences have made me a better writer.

We each have great expectations of what we want our lives to be.

Is your life what you wanted it to be when you were a kid, teenager or in your twenties?

Answer in the comments.