Does Hard Work Always Pay Off?

As the saying goes "hard work always pays off."  Modern society has this notion that if you suffer through something long enough, then the golden nugget will eventually choose you worthy of having all that you desire.  Here is a question for this philosophy.  If hard work pays off, then why aren't more people happy?  Even after the "desired" result achieved, people are still not content and want more.  The answer to this question is not easily found.

The thing that people miss in achieving what they want is that they believe that their pain will be relieved once the specific result has come to pass.  When people do not feel satisfied with getting the thing they wanted, a common statement from others is "you are never happy with anything."  "Maybe it is not what you really wanted."  Is this really the case?  From my experience, neither one of these are true.  No one is angry about not getting that promotion or that the beach property they moved to is not as good as it seemed when they planned everything out.  People are mad because their internal pain still exists even after they put in "all that work" regardless of the result.  What people are angry about is that they did not find a more enjoyable way to achieve their goals.  Enjoyment or fun is doing something for the sake in itself and not for a means to an end.  In other words, most if not all causes of anger all boils down to not knowing how to achieve goals by taking actions done for the sake of themselves and not as a means to an end.  Happiness is doing something for the sake in itself and anger is doing something for a means to an end.

Most people live a means to an end lifestyle.  We all went to college in order for the promise of a better job.  Then when people get out of college, they complain about the job they have.  They keep thinking that "someday," my hard work will pay off, and I will live "the life."  The work is done and "the life" finally becomes a reality, but the person is still unhappy.  He or she is mad because the end result did not relieve his or her pain from all the "work" that was completed.  One would argue that the individual's expectations were too high and that the pain would not have been so great if he or she just expected less.  Expecting less just means that you anticipate disappointment before even setting out for the goal that is trying to be reached.  Disappointment is just a lesser degree of anger.  The person is saying that he or she will not like any process used to achieve the goal.

Everything comes back to process and self worth.  People always say that something is not worth the "effort," "time," "work," or "aggravation."  Here is the issue with this statement.  It puts the worth on something else other than yourself.  In other words, it is like saying "I do not value myself enough to find a process that I can do for the sake of itself in order to achieve my goals."

Enjoyment of the process is what brings happiness to most if not all people.  When people reach goals by doing thing for the sake in of themselves and not for a means to an end, then not achieving the goal by a specific time is not met with anger.  The journey we take to the end goal is more important than the end goal itself.  This last line is a bit cliche, but it is true.  The process matters more because when choose the process of how we obtain our goals, we are putting the value back on ourselves and not on something else.

Traversing Through Transitions in Life.

Everyone goes through hard times every now and again.  During these periods, one has the potential to grow stronger.  Sometimes, when blockades seem to be everywhere, it is best for an individual to focus on what he or she can do to inspire other people instead of trying to find an immediate solution to a problem that keeps persisting.

I have been going through housing and career challenges for a little over a year now.  All the old in my life is leaving, but as of right now, it does not feel like any new is coming in to replace what has been lost.  It feels like I will just end up in a dark void somewhere.  I take this as a sign that I need to realize what talents that I already do have and need to use it in order to uplift other people.  I am too focused on trying to put an end to a situation instead of enjoying what I do have.  This seems to be a “go with flow” period in my life.  The more I force things to come to an end, the more blockades tend to pop up.  In other words, I have Chinese fingertrapped myself.  The more I keep pulling the worse everything gets.  I have to learn how to relax and move forward with caution.  Everyone from my past seems to have exited my life at this point.  Now I am forced to take a big leap of faith.  I have never taken a huge risk in my life.  It does not really seem like I have much of a choice in the matter.  The best thing that I can do for myself at this point is to have patience and keep inspiring other people through my writing until I can obtain clarity on this issue. 

If a person is stuck in a situation for a long time, then he or she most likely needs to look at what type energy is coming from him or her.  Is the individual coming from a place of fear or a place of love?  It is obvious that all of these blockades are just representations of the insecurities that I feel inside my own mind.  The same would probably hold true for everyone else as well.  One needs to find the positive aspects of the imagined turmoil in his or her life in order to succeed.  Once a person is accepting of the new, then it will start coming into his or her life.

Freedom is the Greatest tool that Everyone can use

(This is another letter that I wrote to my father)

Dear father,

It has come to my attention that you and I still have some old baggage that we need to square away.  I am not mad at you that much anymore about everything that happened between us before you died.  I know that you grew up in fifties and sixties when society was trying to force uniformity onto every individual and business that existed at the time.  I learned from an Italian substitute teacher back in high school that around this time frame, a person’s work was more important than his or her safety.  I am sure that this extended to self-expression as well.  Uniformity was valued over individualism.  I am aware that my existence threw all of the values that were enforced in your day out the window.  I was born with Cerebral Palsy, which made my body different than the “standard” individual.  I had difficulties in adjusting to how society worked. 

I am sure that my transgender nature also came as a big shock to you.  The type of transformation that I went through was unheard of in your day.  People definitely did not openly express themselves in this manner fifty years ago.  I know that you thought the best thing for me was to do things the traditional way.  Your negative actions towards my self-expression were just your way of trying to make sure that I did not get hurt.  You were scared that I would become an outcast in society and ruin my life forever.  You thought I was just trying to challenge the status quo because I could. 

The information that was missing all of these years was the fact that you never felt as if you could express yourself freely.  This is why you and I would argue about the heat in the winter time.  You would always say “no one is going to tell me what to do in my own house.”  The anger that you showed towards me was because you thought I was taking away your form of self-expression.  This is also the reason that you could never sell the house we lived in together.  The house was your sense of freedom.  You could make your own rules and do things your way.  You felt inhibited in every place outside the home.  Even though you and I argued a lot, we both were fighting for the exact same thing.  We both wanted freedom from our inner turmoil.  You wanted freedom from the constraints that society placed on you long ago, and I wanted the freedom to use my own power the way that I saw fit. 

The thing that we did not realize was that we could have obtained our freedom long ago.  We let the conditioning of society get to us, and that is why we felt like we lived in some type of cage for most of our lives.  You could have opened up a business that revolved around something that you actually cared about.  Maybe you would have felt like you had freedom outside the home.  If I would have stood up for myself earlier in life and actually learned that I could do more things for myself than I was led to believe, then maybe I would not have hated you so bad when you were alive.  I felt like I had no freedom because I always needed help from everyone else.  The thing I learned since your death is that I do not need much help at all.  I pay all the bills on time, and I found out about Uber and Lyft.  I could have talked to you about getting a data plan for the phones in order to download the apps for both services, but I never did that.  I never brought up or forced the issue, so I did not get anything out of it. 

The events we shared together are all in the past now.  I plan to move farther away from the Baltimore area and create the life I want for myself.  The bank owns the house now, so I have to get out of it in the near future.  I no longer hold any grudges against you.  Become a soul that shines brightly in the universe and use the knowledge that you gained in our interactions to help others living or dead.  You taught me how to take my own power back.  I cannot pinpoint what you have learned from me, but I hope you learned that all the different ways an individual can express him or herself is important.  Individuals make up society, so when each person lives authentically, society as a whole becomes a little bit better over time.  

Is Meditation Right for Everyone?

Meditation is a practice that a lot of people get into when their lives start going downhill.  One’s health could also take a turn for the worse as well.  Most use meditation in order to calm down from a stressful situation.  The only thing people do not realize is that the practice of meditation may end up changing the way they perceive the world.  Unintentional changes may occur if meditation is performed regularly over an extended period of time. 

When one meditates, he or she calls back to his her own energy as well as the energies of the universe as a whole.  The first thing an individual will most likely notice is that minor ailments will heal after about a week or two.  My arm was always sore from opening up the bathroom door at my job.  My arm healed up within a week after I started meditating regularly.  Falling asleep can occur to beginners even if one is not lying down.  An individual might experience a lucid dream when this transpires..

After meditating for about three months, an individual might be able to feel his or her own aura.  He or she might write it off as some body parts falling asleep, but this is not the case.  An individual will eventually learn that there is nothing wrong with him or her whatsoever.  What is actually happening is that the person’s awareness is growing.  The aura that is felt always existed, but it always went unnoticed by the individual.    

With all of these changes occurring, one’s beliefs about many things will also go through a metamorphosis.  I used to eat beef semi regularly before I started to meditate.  I stopped eating beef almost altogether five months after I started meditating.  The same most likely has happened to a lot of others. 

One will also start to notice synchronicites.  The individual will start learning that coincidences are nothing more than things with similar energy coming together.  When a person thinks or says a certain word to him or herself, he or she will notice that something else will resemble the same thought somewhere else in the room regardless if it is written form, from the TV or spoken from someone else in another seat.

If the career a person has is not doing him or her any good, then regular meditation will eventually lead the individual to rethink what he or she is doing in life.  This happened to me as well.  I was working in a call center trying to achieve arbitrary daily statistics because I thought that doing this would actually bring me success.  My job was the only thing that I cared about.  After I started meditating on a regular basis, I realized that I needed to start writing again.  I also came to the conclusion that I was a healer and needed to help other people take their power back. 

Meditation has many benefits, but it can also have quite a few drawbacks depending on the eye of the beholder.  If an individual likes his or diet, friends, job, residence, town, interests, and hobbies, then he or she might not want to meditate very often if at all.  If a person is happy with living in three dimensions and has no interest in learning what coexists along with it, then it is advised not to meditate.  If an individual likes his or her own opinions and does not want their views challenged in any way, then meditation should be avoided at all costs.  In short, if a human being likes his or life the way it is and does not want to change anything about it, then he or she should not meditate under any circumstances. 

No one warned me that my world would be turned upside down if I engaged in daily meditation.  I went through a small depression because I felt as if the circumstances in my life were forcing me to become something I felt I would not have chosen willingly. After closer examination, I realized that my old life really was not that great in the first place.  This new beginning was the best thing that could ever happen to me.  I figured that I would give an advisory caution to those new or thinking about getting into meditation.  Once a person’s perspective on the world changes, then he or she will never be able to revert back to old thinking patterns.  One needs to make sure that the practice of meditation is for him or her before he or she makes it a daily habit.    

Developing Intuition

Intuition can be a rather difficult subject to approach.  The word means different things depending upon the context in which the word is used.  During the Modern period, the philosopher Kant used the word to mean perception of the physical world.  During the present time, intuition means how natural something feels.  If the control layout in a particular video game is not similar to all the other titles in a given genre, then people complain that the controls are not intuitive.  Intuition can also indicate that person picks up on subtleties in his or her environment.  The word is sometimes used when the topic of mysticism is brought up.  Someone can have a knowing that goes beyond the physical senses.  Based on a recent experience I have come to the conclusion that Intuition can also include blind knowledge that an individual has no clue about whatsoever.   

I went to a local pizza place called J and P Pizza.  I sat down at a booth across from where I normally sit.  There was a group of about seven people or so.  After consuming my usual order of one medium cheese pizza and a cherry coke, I accidentally hit the alarm button on my phone.  This option gave me the time of a few different countries.  I decided it would be fun to find the time difference between the United States and Australia.  There was a fifteen and a half hour time difference between the two places.  Thirty seconds after I found the time difference, I hear one of the men in the group say something about Australia.  I am not sure what the details were, but that seemed rather odd.  My thoughts then drifted to what I needed to get done before the day was over.  I also thought about why I seemed to know the time even without looking at a clock too often.  A minute after I began thinking about these ideas, I hear one of the women in the group talk about her daily morning and evening routines. 

About ten minutes later, a couple sits down in a booth that is close to mine.  My mind starts to drift to the financial situation that is happening in my life at the present moment.  The couple then starts talking about betting money on football teams.  Thoughts about health insurance pop into my head.  I was wondering if changing carriers would be an option so early in the year.  The couple in the booth then starts talking about doctor appointments and coughing quite a lot.  The woman also spoke about going to a funeral recently.  These people kept going on and on about sickness.  I began to feel depressed about my life.  I do not why my thoughts turned negative.  I can only assume that I picked up some of the negative energy from the couple in the booth.

One might argue that all of these events are just my subconscious honing in on things that are of value to me.  This is not the case at all.  Australia has no meaning in my life at all.  I am sure that it is a fine continent, but I do not have any relationship with it.  I do not worry about doctor appointments or getting sick too often.  I do not worry about financial matters every day of my life.  There would be no reason for my subconscious to pick any of these things out through the conversations of other people. 

The only other explanation is that I have an underdeveloped sixth sense.  Everyone has the capability of enhancing themselves in this manner.  What form the sixth sense takes all depends on what the individual values the most.  The mind is most valuable thing that I have.  Since I hold this belief, it is no wonder that my sixth sense came out as mental energy.  If I could figure out a way to develop my sixth sense further, maybe I could this ability to help others.  I do not know the exact form my sixth sense would take. 

One thing that I can state for certain is that I have never experienced anything like this before in all of my life.  I know myself pretty well. I have never been one to stretch the truth by any means.  I was never a person with a heavy interest in the occult until about ten months ago.  I would know whether or not my experiences were just a product of my imagination.  My intuition is real, and I will learn to trust what it tells me one day.  Once I am able to master this skill, then I will able to assist others that have fallen on hard times.           

Mirror Images

It has always been said that mirrors are harmless because they are just a reflection.  This is hardly ever the case.  Mirrors reflect back what we put our energy towards.  If one does not like his or her reflection then all he or she has to do is try to focus on the positive aspects of a situation while letting his or her feelings flow even if they are negative.

I work inside of a call center talking to others about financial matters.  I am not allowed to go to the bathroom very often.  I have to stick to the script without showing any emotion whatsoever.  I am supposed to sit in a chair and take verbal abuse all day long without blinking.  Because I am not allowed to feel things deeply, my inner voice gets upset when I do not listen to it.  My stomach then starts to get tight, and I might feel sick later on in the day.  This happened on a daily basis for quite a while.  I have even suffered stress related illnesses such as pharyngitis because of the circumstances.

When my father was still alive, my home life was not that great.   I did not feel like I could express myself freely in front of him.  I was always very dry and somewhat robotic when he was around.  This is very similar to how I felt when I am at work.  Because I was stressed out a lot of the time, I had difficulty going to the bathroom right before going to bed.  Sometimes my father would pick me up from work when I got sick and wanted to come home early.  Before even getting out of the car to help me pack up my walker, he would say things such as “you are going to lose your fifty thousand dollar job.”  Any other ordinary person would ask how I was feeling and wonder why I got sick quite a bit.  My father was never concerned about my health.  When I got some teeth pulled late last year, the only thing that my father worried about was whether or not my I had job security.  The same can be said for my place of employment as well.  When the company bought lunch for the employees, everyone was served food from places such as Pizza Hut, Chik-fil-A, and Popeyes.  These are not the best choices for nourishment when it comes to nutrition. 

My father went to the hospital a few days after the Fourth of July holiday.  I did not have a ride home from the work that day.  I had to take a taxi to get home.  I then called the police to file a missing person’s report because I was not aware that my father had been hospitalized.  My father was only supposed to visit the doctor after he dropped me off at the call center.  I then received news of my father’s passing three weeks later through a text message from my brother.  I had to make the choice the night before weather or not I would try to prolong the life span of my father or let him go.  I have been or leave from work for a while trying to sort out my affairs from what transpired

The comparison of the call center and my father indicate that they were just mirror images of one another.  I felt as if I could not express myself freely in the call center as well as in a conversation with my father.  My father did not care about my health or his for that matter.  This image is replicated in the food choices that were offered at work.   I had suffered bathroom difficulties in both places on multiple occasions.  I took leave from the call center the day I filed the missing person’s report.  In a sense, my father’s death marked changes in my career path. 

Mirrors are not just a pointless reflection that we use for physical beauty.  They reveal what is going on in each of our lives.  Everyone has the ability to change the path that he or she is traveling at any point in time.  People can choose to believe that mirrors lie about their reflection, or they can take steps to improve what is reflected.  Every event in life comes down small choices made on a daily basis.  The choices that an individual selects in the present are then reflected in an event that takes place at some later time period.  Choices start from the inside and then ripple outward.  I did not use my power in active way.  I let others take my power and use it for themselves.  The choice to give my power away led down a pathway full of negative consequences.  My father abused me by draining all of my financial resources.  I did not have much of an identity of my own outside of my job at the call center.  Now I have to develop an identity that is separate from a career.  I need to develop some skills that I value in order to leave my mark on the world.  Ever since my father and the call center have disappeared from my life, I am no longer stressed over every little thing.  The reflection in the mirror is a lot different now than it was five months ago.  Hopefully the choices I am currently making will change the image that I see for the better.     

Little Things Do Matter

Life sometimes teaches that the little things in life do matter.  This can be seen in everyday occurrences.  People can either choose to see circumstances and daily events however they want to. The good in life is always there, but one has to be receptive to receiving it.

I use the UIber cell phone car service quite often.  After the driver pulls up to my place, he or she  usually tries to help me get in his or her vehicle.   These people always want to put my walker in the trunk, but they are clueless how to fold the apparatus so that it will fit. I then show the drivers how everything works, and we both have a laugh.

During the actual ride, the drivers will ask about my disability.  Some think that I have the condition known as Multiple Sclerosis, but I tell them that I have Cerebral Palsy.  I also give a short detailed explanation of how my disability affects me on a day to day basis.  The drivers are always impressed with  how high functioning I seem to be.  They also tell me that I have a great attitude for someone with my condition. 

In some instances, these people will tell a story about a troubling time in their lives as well.  One lady that drove to me to a local diner in the neighborhood suffered blindness due to high blood pressure during pregnancy.  She went completely blind for six months.  The doctors thought that she would never recover.  A miracle somehow transpired, and the woman regained her sight.  This person once again sees things without any major issues. 

As long as a person keeps trying to go for the things he or she wants in life, then the possibilities are endless.  If I let my disability dictate what I could or could not do, then my life would feel very difficult and limited.  The rough parts of life exist to help people grow stronger.  They show us that we are capable of much more than we realized previously.  The trick about rough patches in life is that they all start out as something small and expand outward.  Nothing big ever just hits somebody out of the blue.  The only reason why someone believes that something came from out of nowhere is because he or she was not open to the smaller changes taking place all around him or her beforehand.  When a person ignores change, then his or her point of view remains stagnant.  Change is always happening, but people fail to see it because they have their own agenda about how things are supposed to be.  Things are not supposed to be any way at all.  I can either see my disability as a limitation, or I can see it as something that sets me free. 

Cerebral Palsy has allowed me to be more open about my life with others.  It gets people to think about and ask questions beyond life's mundane tasks.  My disability invites conversations from others who might not have spoken to me if I were able-bodied. 

The little things in life do matter because everything has the potentiality for change to occur.  I made the Uber drivers rethink their position about what it means to have a disability.  Anyone can change the world, but he or she must act on his or her thoughts for the desired result to happen.