🅸 🆃🅷🅸🅽🅺 🆃🅷🅰🆃 🅸🅵 🅸 🆆🅴🆁🅴 🆃🅾 🅳🅸🅴 🆃🅾🅳🅰🆈, 🅸 🆆🅾🆄🅻🅳 🅱🅴 🅾🅺🅰🆈 🆆🅸🆃🅷 🆃🅷🅰🆃.

 

For you see, I was given an opportunity and chance to experience this world…
and I am now a better person just by having experienced it.
I choose to live.  I will always choose to live, but if that choice is made for me before I would choose it myself, that’s okay too.  Ultimately, it isn’t my choice anyway.

 

I like to try and challenge myself to find something within each day that I can apply to myself to better who I am.  This might be through interactions with other people, places, things, and experiences.
It can be difficult after having a bad day to search for something that you don’t even want to exist because frankly, you’re in a lousy mood, why would you want to know it isn’t 100% justified?

The truth is, no matter how much you might not like it to be true, there are always ways of finding the thing(s) that is buried within what appears to be a heaping pile of wasted space, you just have to be willing to look- and I mean really look.
It’s easy for me to cast aside a big mess and be close-minded and unwilling to accept that there is a possibility that it really isn’t a mess at all when given a closer look.  These times I choose to take a closer look at this pile of mishaps, I am able to respect and acknowledge that it is a combination of many different things, and often times I’ve even cast aside beautiful treasures that are also within this pile because I didn’t notice them before– I was too preoccupied with placing all of my energy and attention on the negative things, so it sort of all became negative. Does that make sense?

I’ll put it into a quote for you:

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.” -John Lubbock

That quote speaks volumes of pure truth, and if you don’t believe me, test it out in your own day-to-day life.

You know, there was a time in my life in which I literally experienced John Lubbock’s famous words.  I had a series of unfortunate life alterations that I never asked for happen rather rapidly, and I sort of spiraled down into this dark hole.

Two Years…

That is how long I stayed there in that dark hole.

I guess I sort of just accepted that this is where I had ended up and that was that.

I woke up everyday and told myself that the day would be miserable, that work would be a pain, that nobody really cared about me, etc…
And guess what happened?

Every day was miserable.

Two years of my life I spent in this mindset, merely existing, hopeless and stuck in the dark pit.  Luckily I realized (after two years, mind you) that I was tired of feeling the way I did, and so I decided to change.  There was nothing I could do about the things that had happened to put me there in the first place, and there was no way possible to change any of it.  And so after 2 years of staring down at the mud on my shoes and the steep impossible walls that surrounded me in my dark gloomy hole, I decided to change my perception.  I looked up for the first time in those 2 miserable years, and would you believe it if I told you there was this ladder there? It had always been there, I’d just chosen not to see it for what it was. It was enmeshed in the problem the whole time! The solution was in the problem all this time and I never saw it! Crazy right?!
And just like that, I climbed out.

That experience taught me that there is always beauty in everything, and just when I think I’ve had the ugliest and worst experience of my life, the treasure I discover hidden within something so seemingly horrific, well, it often leaves me speechless.

The catch?  You’ll never find it if you don’t truly believe it exists.

But when you do, my friend, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

So until you decide that you’re open to believing that good exists within bad,
enjoy that little pit you’ve dug for yourself, get cozy, and continue to blame everyone and everything else for putting you there.  Stay as long as you’d like.

Please know that the shovel has been sitting by your feet for however long you’ve been there… and while you may not be willing to see it, that doesn’t mean that everyone else hasn’t.

Me?  I have learned to own up to my faults, I’m just human, and I’d have never learned had I not made mistakes, and continue to make them everyday. I also had the damn shovel sitting at my damn feet in the damn pit I’d dug and trapped my damn self in! Damn, damn damn! I see this now! It just made sense to make it about everything other than what it actually was about:  me.

And since I couldn’t change everything else, guess what?  I decided to change the one thing I wasn’t powerless over, which is myself.  I changed my outlook, my perception, and acknowledged my tendency to be a martyr.

Today I try my best to embrace all experiences I’m given, even if it’s just taking out the trash.

Every moment I have will never exist again, I only get it once, so I will do my damndest to make the most of it and to live in the here and now.  If I’m anywhere other than in the present, I’m lost, because nothing else really exists. I have no time machine, and I am no fortune teller who can predict the future…. the only time it will ever be, that I will ever have, is right now.

I choose to embrace it.