It is not only my right and my privilege to walk in the abundance God has for me, it is my responsibility…just as it is my responsibility to live the rest of my truth. — Jan Denise

I am not responsible for your happiness and you are not responsible for mine. This is some very powerful freeing stuff I am learning.

This is not an accusatory statement, but one of personal responsibility. I was explaining this to a friend earlier tonight, but first let me give you a little bit of background.

About twenty years ago I was living in Los Angeles, I had been in the entertainment business almost five years. I had worked myself up from a production assistant, to a location scout, location manager, video editor, and an occasional production manager. I was working in an office with four producers, a husband and wife team who focused only on European commercials, and two film producers, one who to this day is quite successful.

I was at a place in my life where I thought everything was heading in the right direction, my father and brother were having some serious financial troubles and they moved in with me. This was probably one of the most prolific times for me in terms of writing. If you saw me, then you saw me with pen and paper in hand, or 3 x 5 cards jotting down notes or ideas. I was working on pitching ideas for screenplays and actually came quite close to landing a deal.

During this time my younger brother was going through some serious emotional issues and my life was now consumed in chaos, and looking back on it now this really set the tone for everything else. We began to attract nothing but chaos, anything and everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong.

It all culminated in two events where one week my father was driving my car and it was totaled in a wreck, and just seven days later to the day I was driving a motor home full of models from our shooting location back to a hotel where our production offices were set up, when I ended up on the end of a three car pile up where seven people went to the hospital.

Neither my father or I have ever been driving during a car accident, and in one week we both totaled two vehicles, interesting how that just seemed to have happened.

I phoned my father that afternoon and I asked him point blank. “Where would you guys be happy?” Their response was “Back in Colorado.” So I gave up my dreams of a Hollywood career, and moved us all to Colorado Springs. I was actually closer to achieving my dream than I had ever been, in fact my producer friend was in the process of hiring a writer for an idea I pitched him.

Thus began an almost twenty year career of me helping someone else to try and find their happiness. I moved from helping out my father and brother, to taking care of my mother. Then onto my sister and my two nieces, then even for a bit my grandmother, then back to my sister and two nieces.

I don’t regret helping out my family, nor do I hold it against them. The point in all of this as I was explaining to Jim tonight, is that “helping” them all this time was in fact just a crutch to avoid taking responsibility for creating my own unhappiness in life. They became my excuse for why I failed in Hollywood, for why I failed to achieve my potential, when all it boils down to was I used them to avoid even trying to accomplish those dreams. Why? That four letter word I used in a very recent post. F-E-A-R.

I have been thinking about this all night and it really hit hard as I drove home without the radio on. I do some of my best philosophizing when the radio is off in the car. What I had come to realize was that if I had instead went out and created my own happiness , chased my dreams, reached my potential I very well could have been much more successful than I am today, which would in turn help me create an abundant life, then I would have been more capable of sharing that abundance without having to give up my own happiness.

I have seen this in action. Two of my greatest friends live highly abundant lives, and because of this they share their abundance with others, and this trickles down I don’t know how far, and it all began with just one of those two friends in the beginning sharing her abundance with the other.

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Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow. — Melodie Beattie

I really enjoy getting up every morning and writing my gratitoodz posts. The interesting thing is I could go to bed the night before and not know what I’m going to write about and then wake up the next morning and immediately have an idea for a post. I then sit down and the words just begin to flow with such ease, no real work at all. The fun part is looking for an image and quote to go with each post, it is honestly a really fun “task.”

This morning I wanted to touch on something I wrote about in my post titled “My New Years Eve Gratitoodz,” and how writing my gratitoodz posts every day has helped me to attract much more positive experiences in my life. In that post I used an example of road rage and how I now react to such events in my life, however here is the interesting thing, since I started writing and focusing on my gratitudes every morning I have not had one single incident in almost two weeks when before it was a daily occurrence.

I started writing my gratitudes around the 22nd of December, and the last known incident where I experienced road rage was a few days before that, when I came upon an accident where a truck loaded down with Dr. Pepper spilled all of it out into the street.

I was approaching the intersection and was right in the blind spot of a man in an SUV who was too busy checking out the cans of soda that were rolling all over the place, and without looking he began to merge into my lane as my front bumper was right around his left passenger door so I tapped on my horn to warn him. This led to a confrontation that lasted for about ten minutes where I did my best to explain to him how wrong he was for being upset with me, and how poorly he was behaving in front of his young daughter.

At this time in my life I was still under the impression that it was my responsibility to point out all the mistakes people made, or do my best to fulfill their happiness at the expense of my own, which I will touch more on in a later post today.

My dad and I we talk five to seven days a week, and most calls last two hours, and one thing that we used to discuss almost every time we talked was how the world had become a much more dangerous and confrontational place.

I had pointed out that growing up when I first started driving I would have those “Oh my God I could have died” experiences maybe once a month. You know the ones I’m talking about, you’re just going about your life driving around town taking care of business when you or someone else does something so stupid that you realize that your life came within just feet or seconds of possibly ending that day.

Well we noticed that those now occurred daily, along with the fact it was now impossible to go out into public and not experience a confrontation with a store clerk who just happened to be having a bad day, or quite simply was just rude and ill-mannered. Since I started writing my gratitude posts that has only happened once and I was prepared to address this issue with every level of management I could all the way up to the owner of the company when I realized how much power I was giving him over my life, and decided it was just not worth it to give that brief moment one more thought.

So here I am, at the point. If you haven’t figured out yet that I can be a bit long winded I’m putting into print now for you, you haven now been warned.

The Law of Attraction says that “like attracts like.” Your thoughts become things, and my thoughts for so long have been focusing on the negative in life that, that is definitely what I was going to experience. It is kind of hard not to find those things when that is all you look for.

My day now begins with me being thankful which starts me off in a very positive direction, and now I attract more positive in my life than negative. You also can’t create others realities, you cannot be responsible for their happiness, and when I learned that it no longer mattered when someone would enter my life however fleeting the moment was and tried to bring chaos into it.

So now the world is no longer a much more dangerous or confrontational place, it is a place filled with loving family and friends. It is a place filled with interesting people and experiences, it is a wonderful place.

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To get rich never risk your health. For it is the truth that health is the wealth of wealth. — Richard Baker

Today I am grateful for my health.  On May 2nd, 2007 I weighed in at 325 pounds which was quite a load on my 5′ 6 1/2″ frame.  However today I weigh in at just over 242 pounds which brings my current weight loss to 83 pounds.

I have dropped down from a 4 XL to a 2XL or 1XL depending upon the clothing line.  Shirts I couldn’t wear before my lap-band surgery because they were too small, now drape my body as if they were a robe.

My waist size has gone from a 50 to almost a 38, and now when I buy any clothes I no longer have to pay the extra $2-$4 for the larger sizes, or shop in the “big and tall” section.

The change in clothing sizes are just a small victory in all of this, it is my change in health that I celebrate.  I am so grateful that I now sleep through an entire night without waking up due to sleep apnea, being more rested now I think clearer, I’m also no longer always sleepy.  In fact I can now read a book again without falling asleep after the first page.

I am grateful that the weight loss will continue and barring any unforeseen problems my time on this big blue marble has been extended, and I will now get to experience even more interesting events and people.

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My New Years Resolutions

A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other. — Anonymous

To say that I am excited about 2008 would be an understatement. I anticipate every day, I am so excited about what the future brings it is so hard for me to live in the present, which brings me to my New Years Resolutions.

• Learn to forgive my self - I will cite the “I am only human” excuse, which is true. I have my faults, and my flaws, and I recognize and owe up to the responsibility for the mistakes I have made in the past. It has been hard for me to get over some of those mistakes and forgive myself so I can move on to greater things. This I feel is extremely important for me to work on this year, this is by far the most important resolution I have.
• Learn to live in the present - We cannot forget the past we can only learn from it, nor can we really concern ourselves about the future. The only thing we can deal with is right now, the present, and this is something I really need to work on. I can be a worrier, I have been a worrier as far back as my memories go. I was reading the newspaper by the time I was five years old and my mother had told me often that she thought as a child that I shouldered too many of the world’s problems.
• Learn to anticipate the future - Once again we should not worry about the future, we should live in the present but anticipate the future and what it brings.

I could write resolutions all day long about how I will be more organized, I will lose weight, I will start exercising, blah blah blah… but I feel if I can just work with these three resolutions I will find the solutions to any and all other problems I need to work on, so there you have it, my New Years Resolutions. I would love to hear yours.

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We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live life fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating, and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime. — Herbert A. Otto

I welcome 2008 into my life with a grateful heart knowing that I have lead and will continue to lead an interesting life, and have met and will continue to meet interesting people. When I was a younger man I could be heard often saying that I could die even then knowing that I had led an interesting life.

But then something happened, I traded adventure for security, and the only result from that was allowing fear to creep into my life. This began a period of my life where I experienced crippling bouts of anxiety, and I was in constant fear of dying.

As I sit here I recall many nights where I had laid in a hospital emergency bed with my heart rate through the roof, doctors trying to figure out what was wrong with me, me just knowing that I was dying. The fear began to rule my life and I allowed it to make all my decisions never traveling further than the front porch for over a month. This fear became so strong that I couldn’t go to sleep, I just knew that if I closed my eyes I would never wake up. I ended up in the hospital due to exhaustion and I was admitted to the psych ward.

This was a very bleak period of my life, I was in and out of the hospital and spent well over ninety days behind the lock doors of a special ward, but that couldn’t compare with the prison walls the fear built around me. What it took for me to break free from this crippling fear was quite simple really.

I was lying in a bed in the emergency room dying, again, when I came to realize that there was no reason to fear dying because I was already dead. I sure wasn’t living, my life had completely stopped. It was then that I decided I would take control from there on, I was tired of dying, it was once again time to live.

My journey didn’t end there, I have spent the last eight years trying to find the path that I was on and continue my journey. I think I have found it, the signs are definitely there, life is definitely interesting again.

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