Tag: self-awareness

Forward progress

Things always work out for me. Inexplicably at times. This is not to say that I am in a particularly wonderful place right now. Compared to most people my age, (can I say this with certainty?) I am way beneath the expectations of my years financially and emotionally. I am playing a frenetic game of catch-up in both arenas. My success is questionable.
But I am moving forward.

I’m always moving forward. It is what makes me who I am. When they finally bury me, friends and family will universally declare that I never gave up. This is not braggadocious, it is fact. See, everyone loves to call people fighters, survivors, etc. It is well-intentioned enough, but it doesn’t require toughness to merely stay alive. Survival is the mere act of not dying. It is strength of spirit that determines whether you are a quitter or not. To me, quitting is accepting your station in life and not trying to move forward and overcome it. Strength of spirit allows you to say no to victimhood. To avoid asking “why me?” and start asking “Why not me?”. Strength of spirit allows you to pick yourself up and try again. Strength of spirit is all that I have.
Well, to be fair I have also been blessed with incredible luck.

It’s odd. Most people wouldn’t consider my litany of health problems, which have been the source of most of my problems, lucky. But the evidence is in. I was lucky enough to get two kidney transplants. The odds of finding a compatible second donor were staggeringly not in my favor. But it happened. Less important but significant, I fell into a situation that resulted in my dream job. Sure, illness took it away from me but I still lived it. And that’s better than not having it. And despite a miserable marriage, I lucked out with 4 amazing human beings for children.

As a person who believes that life is not what happens, but how you react to it, the lucky part is that I learned gratitude, perspective, humility, faith and self-awareness. I have learned to recognize lessons in adversity ( and in my own stupidity). In addition, I have learned that no matter how bad things get, one day I will wake up and realize that they somehow got better.

I don’t know when it happened, but in the last couple of weeks I have been lucky enough to recognize how good my life really is.

The relationships, the money, all of the things that I find myself worrying about…that stuff will all work out. I always land on my feet.

Stoic and didn’t know it

I’ve always desired to live my life by a Philosophy, a theory or attitude as a guiding principle for my behavior. It’s a source of great curiosity to me because, before I really explored my need for this, it felt like I was a protégé without the luxury of a mentor. It was as if I wasn’t leading my own way, but instead I was looking for someone or something to guide me.
Which made me a follower. Which I hate. When it comes to who you are, nobody wants to be a lump of wet clay.
That realization saddened me and served as a revelation as well. I looked hard at things and realized the many ways in which I tried to be someone or something that I was not. It took far too long, but eventually, I developed the ability to be myself. Of course, that presented a whole different set of challenges. “Myself” was not a guy that I wanted to spend time with. I am working on that and it is a challenge that I am not taking lightly. In fact, it is almost entirely what I think, dream, read and write about. I am taking a particularly hard look at where the “follower” in me ends and where the unique individual in me begins. After much investigation, the inevitable conclusion was that I was not living a life and presenting a persona that was consistent with my core beliefs and desires.
In short, I didn’t know who or what the hell I was!

Thus began the most difficult thing I have ever done, taking a searching and fearless look into what really mattered to me. To do so required me to identify every way in which my life was ruled by convention and to challenge it. The good news is I think I have a better idea now. But I wish I knew how I was able to deny myself the liberation of living by my core values and beliefs, my very nature, for so many years of my life. Was I afraid of challenging the status quo?
I didn’t require a great “philosophy of life”. No school of thought or set of principles is going to serve every situation. I believe that what I needed was consistency and I was in search of a means to maintain it.

I’ve learned a lot about myself of late. But learning is not enough. I must embrace what I have learned, live it not shy away from it, and create real growth. As a good start, I am definitely defying convention, the very thing that made me a follower.

For the sake of brevity, I will not list all of the many ways that I have changed my thinking, I just want to touch on one. I always thought that I was complex. Yes, I know, all men say that. But as it turns out I’m very simple. Not Carl from Sling Blade simple, simple in that I don’t need or want much. I like things to be manageable, regardless of how difficult situations become. Simple to understand and consistent in what I stand for. Simple as defined by the familiar colloquialism “you get what you see.” If only there were a school of philosophy that embraced simple existence, harmonious and non-intrusive. One for those who want to live with the earth, not just on it.

Imagine my joy when I (re)discovered Stoicism! There IS a Philosophy that I CAN use and adhere to as I work towards the life I crave. Stoicism is actually quite simple.

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

― Epictetus

I have been a Stoic and didn’t know it!