Tag Archives: Life

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.

Finding the Life-blood of Writing Through Failure.

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Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stumbling through the world we find our place. It can be at a table, desk or it could be standing all day waiting tables; either way, we’re finding.

Through our stumbling and our constant search, we may come to an impasse, a place where everything has fallen down around us and we discover that we’re stronger than we believed, or that we may be lost in a cycle of failure.

Failure is normal, and regardless of what your parents say, failure is good, we can learn from failure.

In failure we can find the things we’ve done wrong previously. We can discover far off discontent that we never knew existed. But only through the times we fail can this come to fruition.

Falling on our faces, dirt in our ears, sand caked in our hair, that is the failure which brings about the change we need for ourselves.

We’ve entered the time when our life or writing are the lifeblood of our souls.

Life-blood, that’s a hell of a thing. It’s the thing which drives us, pushes us and makes us commit to the life of a writer, the long nights, dreary weekends stuck in the house and the celebratory days when we get published.

Our life-blood pours through us, it connects us to each other and makes us strive to write better through the failures, through the droughts of lost words and at the end of it, we discover.

In this discovery, we find ourselves, not the failures we thought we were, and certainly not the people our parents believe us to be.

It’s not our failures which are added up, but our successes.

 

Stemming the Tide of Depression with Transcendental Meditation

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In September my grandfather passed away and there were a few things about that which set me into a severe depression which no one noticed, not even my wife.

The depression lasted until late February, but it’s been a recurring thing for me since. I’ll get all melancholy, and now that my wife knows what I was going through, she knows what to look for.

Since breaking through the depression, I’d found myself going in and out of depression. Thoughts of suicide ran rampant through my mind on a daily basis during the depression, and lets just say it’s a good thing I don’t own a firearm.

My reasons for trying Transcendental Meditation (TM) stem a lot from the depression I fell into, caused by events following my grandfather’s passing.

In early November I got shingles, I knew this was from the stress of my grandfather’s passing. I also understood that I was beginning to spiral, though I hid it well from my wife, family and co-workers.

The catalyst to get me into TM was a breakdown I had at work, caused by an interaction with a co-worker, who said, “I don’t care what’s wrong with you.” His statement sent me over the cliff.

After work that day I cried in my car for twenty minutes. It was hard sobbing, uncontrollable crying. The type of crying you’d do as a kid. I called my wife on my way home and told her I needed to do something, and soon.

After that day, I knew I had two choices, be done with living, or truly start living. TM is my way to live.

When I attended the first introduction meeting I knew I would do it before I walked in. The next week I took my first lesson. That was one week ago. I feel more awake, and for the first time in a very long time, I feel alive.

TM is a lot like other meditations, except for the mantra. When you learn TM, your teacher gives you a mantra, it’s a word, phrase or combined words which create a tone, that centers you in a way that makes your body drop all its defenses and sends you spiraling into a deep pool of bliss.

I can’t tell you my mantra, because each one is special to each individual. I keep it as a sacred thing.

I can only speak of my experience, but TM was my last stop before jumping. I’ve backed away from the cliff in the last week and I’m now more comfortable in my skin than I’ve been since before my parents were divorced, when I was 8.

If you have any question or comments, please ask them.

 

Diving to the Source, my First Experience with Transcendental Meditation

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Have you ever felt like the world wasn’t what you were told? Have you ever felt that there was someone hiding behind a curtain and eventually they’d jump out and say, “Gotcha”?

I’ve been following a path that many of my generation have. I moved away from faith-based religions and into Eastern Philosophy and have considered myself Buddhist for at least ten years, maybe longer.

In the last few years that hasn’t been enough for me. My meditation practice had fallen off, or been non-existent.

A lot of this was because of a hectic life of a day-job, wife, kids, writing schedules and in not practicing my Mindfulness Meditation, I’ve become more angry and lost faith in who I am, was and where my life was headed.

I wanted something more than Mindfulness Meditation was offering.

My search began to narrow in the last six months.

I watched a speech by David Lynch about Transcendental Meditation, and from there I listened to his audio book of “Catching the Big Fish”, after that I listened to Transcendence by Norman E. Rosenthal on audio.

After listening to those as well as reading Science of Being and Art of Living: Transcendental Meditation I found myself in a place I hadn’t been in a long time; I was without direction.

On Monday I had my first TM session and though I was a bit apprehensive and thought that maybe, just maybe there would be a man with a small alien which he would attach to my spinal column, nothing close to that happened.

The truth is, I’ve never felt something as profound, spiritually like TM. The session was easy and transcending was easier that I thought it would be.

It was as though I were on an elevator and the cable snapped, but I could still control the descent.

The closest feeling I can compare it to is the sound of my kids the first time I heard their cries, it was that life altering.

This post is different from my usual writing posts, because honestly, after my first TM session I feel different.

Going forward I believe my sessions with TM will help me along my path, as well as lead me to new ones, but going forward my perspective is forever altered.

If you have any questions, please ask them below. If I can answer them, I will.

Writing and the Flicker of the Candle

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In the corner it flickers, stretching shadows, emphasizing the darkness and collapsing things around it into small dark little balls.

The candle, though small, creates its own world and as it dances in the night air we see all that it creates.

For every candle we light, another shows up in our dreams. The wick can be worn, tired, burnt, but it stands there reminding us that it was once lit.

For every story we write, the wick burns farther down, but that is a deception for the wick may look worn, tired and burnt but it’s still there.

The reality is that we look at the wick, never the candle. The wick is where our stories come from, the candle is only holding them, just as the wick holds the light.

The darkness, though eclipsed by the light, may be its own deception. Is the darkness hiding from the light, or is the light hiding from the darkness.

We see the light stretch across the room, but the darkness, it hides in the corners, in the folds of the candle wax. It comes out when the light fades, drifting up through the wax, around the top and spreading out across the room.

The darkness, willing itself through the spaces, the nooks and crannies finding its way to the places in the room where the light once stood.

But in its search for more places to hide, the darkness seeks something greater, it wants to be inside our mind.

In the darkness of our mind we create the darkness which stood in the wax. We create monsters, killers and anti-heroes.

But in this darkness we pull the darkness in our reality and put it on the page every day.

Whether our reality is disturbed by the things we pull from our darkness is another thing, but putting that darkness on the page is our release, much the way our night-time dreaming is a release from our daily activity.

In our release we set free the darkness to share with others.