You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.

Yes, I just quoted the theme song to a cheesy 80’s sitcom, but Alan Thick and company had a point when they wrote this song, you gotta just accept it all as a part of life.

When you try to control things outside of your control this causes suffering.  When you live in regret over the past, something that has already happened and out of your control, you are suffering.  When you worry about the future, something that is once again out of your control, you are suffering.  So how do you live without suffering?  By living in the present moment where the only thing you can control is you, and your reaction to external events.

But that is not my point of today’s post.  My point is while I need to learn not to suffer, I also need to learn to accept the pleasure and the pain as both experiences of our existence on this planet.  Neither is good or bad, they are like a twist or a turn on a roller coaster ride.  They are what make the experience of this ride exhilirating, fun, scary, interesting, you fill in your own adjectives, but I think you get the point.

How can you know happiness without ever experiencing sadness?  How can you know comfort without ever experiencing discomfort?  We need these conflicting experiences in our lives to not only enable us to see the contrast, but we need them to help make us grow.  Sometimes in life, like a tree, we need pruning in order to spur growth, and both good and bad experiences are like a pair of garden shears cutting off branches of our being so we can generate that new growth, and grow taller, and stronger than we were before.

These are all just words, and it is hard to put these words into practice when in the middle of a painful uncomfortable experience and accept that experience as just a part of growing, but the first step in acceptance is awareness.

I am grateful for all of the experiences I have had, both good and bad.  I have lived a wonderful, interesting life, and hope it gets even more interesting.  I am excited about the possibilities of what each day may bring me.

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“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” - Confucius

I have fallen many times in my life, but I am grateful for that inner strength as well as the support of loved ones and friends that help me to keep getting back up and moving forward again.

Life was not meant to be easy, where would the fun be in that.  Not that it was necessarily meant to be bad, it was meant to be a challenge.  In looking back on some of my most challenging times in life, I have often been able to find a really important lesson, and even some humor.  I have laughed myself to the point of delirium with my old high school buddy Tim, talking about events in my life that would have had some people jumping off of bridges.

I was listening to Joel Osteen and he was speaking of times where like a plant, or a tree, we need pruning in order to grow.  It’s a really positive you can put on those challenging times when they come around.  If everything were handed to us, without us having to put forth any kind of effort, or work through any kind of challenge, we would all still emotionally be infants.  While pain avoidance is something we humans rely upon, there are certain pains we just have to go through in order to grow into the kind of man or woman we know we can be.

I still have so much I want to do with my life, I don’t want it to all be spent sitting around an analyzing how to live it better, writing blogs, reading books, listening to speakers on my IPOD.  Some of our best lessons are out there waiting for us to be experienced, and we have to learn to welcome the pain that comes with some of those lessons, because if we spend our lives trying to avoid it, we’re definitely going to miss out on the rewards.

I’m a very resilient man, I have had to be for so long.  I’m part pit bull, and part bantam rooster.  The pit bull in me is that stubborn streak that just grabs onto something and I won’t let go until I get it done, and the bantam rooster in me, is that cocky little bird that walks around, strutting his stuff, just daring the world to step up to him, looking fate in the eye and saying, “Make your move, I dare you.”

I’m a bit all over the place with this post.  I guess it’s because in my life I’m a bit all over the place too.  It’s because of so much change I have gone through this past year, while there was a bit of regression, there were some major renovations done deep within that I am proud of.  I just need to balance it, just a bit.

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Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. - Kahlil Gibran

As the title says, I am sort of back.  About 6 or 7 months ago someone special entered my life and I grew to love her as deeply as she did me.  The only problem was, I began to love her more than I did myself, and once I did that, that is when I ventured off my course, and my life was soon out of balance. Her happiness became more important than my own, and because of that I lost her.  I was no longer that same man she fell in love with, I in fact had regressed to a version of my former self, a self that I had hoped was long dead and buried.

She often told me that she couldn’t understand how “she got me,” how she was so lucky to have me in her life.  In my mind, it was I who was the lucky one.  I told her on more than one occasion that there was a reason our paths crossed, that there was a reason for our meeting.  I still believe that to this day there was a reason for us to have come together at that particular place in time, lessons to be learned.  To say I learned a lot of valuable lessons during that time is an understatement.  I am sad and heartbroken that those lessons had to be learned on someone so special.  I wish I could have been a better man at times, a better friend and didn’t need to learn anymore lessons in life, and then we could have spent the rest of our lives just enjoying each other as we often talked about.  But that of course was not how it turned out.

One very important lesson I learned during all of this, is no matter what, you always have to love yourself first.  If you can’t love yourself first, then you’re just not going to really be able to love others in a manner that would be considered the healthiest way of loving.  If you love yourself first, while some of the choices you make may upset those you love, if they truly love you, they will only respect and love you even more.

Another lesson I learned is no matter how much someone may want you to, you just can’t fix others.  At one time, she had told me that my song was “Fix you,” by the group Coldplay.  She told me she needed me in her life, she needed someone to fix her.  In the end I came to realize, that this only causes resentment.

Lots of painful lessons to be learned, but valuable lessons that I will hopefully carry forth into the future so as more special people cross my path, I don’t make the same mistakes I did with her.  It is over, as well as it should be, and it is for the best.  I will forever be grateful for the time I had with her, I will be a better man for having known her.

Where do I go now?  Where any sports team goes when they lose focus, back to the basics.  I am starting over at square one.  I sat down and just mediated on my life for a bit, and took stock of where I am, and how things are going.  I then wrote out some goals for this next week, nothing big and audacious, I just need to get back to that version of me that could find happiness wherever he looked, that found the lesson, and the gratitude in all things, that version of me that continuously attracted so many blessings into my life.  These goals are real simple, just things to tune up the mind, and get my energy flowing in the right direction again.  So here’s what I came up with…

1. Expressing gratitude daily - Whether out loud or on my blog, I need to get back to looking for those things in my life to be grateful for, and there are so many.
2. Daily affirmations - These are a vital tool to keeping the mind focused on the best possible version of me, that I can be.
3. Exercise - I just gotta get moving again.
4. Spiritual Diet - Music, books, movies, t.v., even friends, If it doesn’t feed my mind, my heart, or my soul, then I don’t want it in my life.
5. De-Clutter - Both my bedroom, and my car became a physical manifestation of how chaotic and imbalanced my life had become.  If your physical surroundings are cluttered, then so is your mind, which makes it very difficult to make sound, reasonable choices.

These are my only goals for now.  Until I get myself back on track, a week is long term for me.  I will focus on these goals this week, and continue to do so until they become habit.  Once they become habit, and I have realigned myself with the true desires of my heart, I will begin to bring back those big audacious goals into my life.

Thanks as always for taking the time to stop by and read…

Cary

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