The Evolution of Perspective

You ever sit back and look at your life and wonder to yourself how you keep ending up in the same situations over and over again? There is something painfully disappointing about being stuck in a cycle of habit-initiated decisions. The fact that I put myself there could make me feel worse if I let it. Seeking the familiar only works when I'm avoiding danger. It doesn't work well when I'm trying to live. It works even less while trying to E.Volve. There are so many aspects of life that I have yet to experience. I was talking to my son and explained to him that most of the people we see aren't living their lives. They are fixing something they broke a long time ago. That's where their time, energy, and efforts are going. That's no way to live. It's not even a way to exist. I'm having a hard time understanding right now why it's so difficult for us to make good choices. I'm having a hard time understanding why it's so easy for me to set mys

Every time I get up, I tell myself that my morning will not dictate my day. I'm usually right. If I'm having a good morning, I do what I can to keep up with the momentum. If I'm having a challenging morning, I give myself a deadline to deal with whatever is going on and I move on as best I can after that deadline. It works for the most part. Evolving has been a part of my life for the past 7 years or so. I mean, it's been a part of my existence since I got pushed out of the womb but I've been just living mostly until then. I didn't have a clue about what life was about. And by the time I made my mind up to try to figure it out, I'd set myself up for some uphill battles. And I've been used to battling. It's a nasty habit to have to be ready to fight all the time. And as much as I say I crave peace and the quietness it brings, I seem to find myself making automatic choices based on past experiences. The responses aren't even warranted most times an

I guess I'll take advantage of this "feeling" I have and use it to express some of my discontent with what's going on in my immediate world right now. I've expressed before and will again here that I have a serious issue with people telling people to vote and ending their statement and walking away. People don't care WHAT people are voting for or for WHOM for that matter as long as they exercise this *insert sarcasm* right *end sarcasm* I'm a cynic when it comes to the political process. Part of the reason why is because I feel like people don't take voting as seriously as they claim they do.....but turn around and judge people who choose not to vote at all. Ask the average voting citizen where the candidates stand on any important issue and I wonder if they can tell you. Ask the average voting citizen who the independent candidates running for office are and I'm almost sure they cannot tell you....HELL, some of them are unaware of the fact that

I've been getting all kinds of reminders and lessons lately. The most recent lessons are about feelings of entitlement and the illusion of need. The most recent reminder was that I need to chill and cultivate my anger appropriately. While I was steady on my path down the yellow brick E.Volution road, I looked down and noticed that my shoes were shitty. I looked back on the path that I'd been traveling recently and saw that I've been leaving a trail of shitty footprints behind me. I started wondering to myself how long it's been since I assessed how close I am to being a whole person. And while I don't expect to be a perfect person, I do expect to accentuate my positive qualities and do what I can to diminish or remove my negative ones. And if I can't diminish or remove them, I'll at least learn to manage them so that I don't look up and realize I've been being an asshole. I had a conversation with a friend of mine earlier this week. Someone close

I've been talking too much lately. I've been talking about the wrong things to the wrong people under the wrong circumstances. I caught myself the other day. The messed up part about it is that I've done it for so long that it took me a minute to remember what the right things to talk about are. Drama is pervasive. It's sneaky. It looks very different at each level of evolving. But it always looks like a distraction. It looks like minding other people's business. It looks like trying to "help" people when they didn't ask for my help. It looks like trying to help people when they really don't want to change. It looks like paying attention to the details of someone else's situation when my own are frayed and coming undone. There are more than enough areas of my own life that require my attention. The fact that I feel like I can devote any significant amount of time to anyone else's life to me means that I still have a lot of growing up to d

NOTE TO SELF: Drama is more appropriate in tv, movies, and literature than in real life. That's why you made a conscious effort to keep it out of your space. My future ain't urban fiction!

So I'm talking to my friend tonight. We're talking about the whole dating thing. He is a nice guy. He's a gentleman, he's respectful, he's funny, and I enjoy his company. He enjoys mine. I ask him why he doesn't have a girlfriend. The obvious answer is because he doesn't want one. He goes on to explain to me that he has trouble trusting women. I can understand that. Some of us do things that deem us untrustworthy. He also explains that he's more of a loner. I definitely can understand that. I was talking to him about the lessons I learned from my last relationship. I make a joke about how the dude couldn't have possibly liked me that much because of some of the things he'd say and do. I'm really glad that I can make light of the situation a lot more now. It signifies, to me at least, how much I've moved on and am no longer hurt as much about the idea of not being connected to him. And while I'm not rushing the process, I am fully aw

I have a lot of male friends. I have two brothers. I have some male acquaintances. I have some exes. I was having a conversation with one of my male friends and it dawned on me once again that as much as women pride themselves on being the 'smarter' sex, it never ceases to amaze me how much we play ourselves by not paying attention to the very people who we claim to want and allude to being superior to. *disclaimer* I am not speaking about all women or all men in this blog. I, however, do not want to continue to write some 700 times. *end disclaimer* This imagined intellectual and emotional superiority leaves a lot of us with our feelings hurts. When you think that you're smarter than someone, it's easy to underestimate who and what they are. The greatest lesson that I got out of my conversation last night was that for men, time and money are important. It's not that I didn't know it before. I learned it in a different way last night. If he's giving you

I look out my window today because I hear a lot of people outside. I see a guy prepping a blunt. He's sitting on the curb in between two cars putting weed in a blunt. It's 4:30 in the afternoon on a Monday. I watch him for about 15 seconds to make sure he's doing what I think he's doing and then I walk outside and ask if he can do that elsewhere. He says that he's waiting for his ride to come to the car and taps the car to his right. I go in the house and start thinking. Do I remember the transition? Do I remember the point in time when it became o.k. to sit in the street and roll up a fat one? I can vaguely remember people starting to not give a f*ck. I want to say it started with my generation. The one that followed me and the one that followed it are very into themselves. By that I mean, we do things and aren't as necessarily concerned with the impact or influence on others. I'm sure that is a variation of a personal freedom but with freedom comes a diffe

I've watched several intimate connections disconnect in many ways over the last week or so. One of them was mine. Something shifted. Something's in the water. Something's in the air. WHATEVER. One of the things that I realized was that I didn't pay attention to my intuition. Fifteen years ago, if I didn't pay attention to my intuition, I ignored the fact that I didn't pay attention to it and blamed him for being who he was. Today, I realize that the longer I ignore that NAGGING THOUGHT that this person isn't the right person for me, the longer I delay the inevitable. The more I ignore the warning signs, the more I open myself to someone else's foolishness. Some people will take advantage if you let them. Some people will walk through an opened door....even if the sign on the door reads "If you walk through this you will hurt my feelings". They'll walk through the door if they believe that there's something on the other side of the door

It’s that feeling you get when you know you should be doing something else. When you know you should be doing something bigger than what you’re currently doing. You know, when you wake up and realize that you slowly but surely got off track…….one tragic step in the wrong direction at a time. I recently realized this. It almost broke me down. I remember wanting to scream and cry and stomp and pout like a baby. I cried. And for a while, I allowed myself to become a victim. I kept wondering why people were trying to treat me the way they were. I didn’t like it. I wanted them to stop. Then I talked to someone and I talked myself away from the ledge. I talked my way through and out of my issue. I walked away from being a victim. I remembered that I am in charge. I remembered that I have the right to make things happen. I also remembered that I have a responsibility to. So I made some appointments and decisions. I started thinking of a master plan. I realized that it’s only my fault when t

I recently had a pretty bad argument with someone I used to be close to. The argument was about time. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a stickler for time. I show up to work at least 15 minutes early each day on average. When someone is having an event, I show up at the event start time. I calculate travel time, traffic, parking, etc into my commute. I plan accordingly. I let people know what my approximate arrival time will be. People who know me will agree. So when the people who know me feel as though they don't have to respect my respect for time, I get upset. Waiting for someone for more than 20 minutes is ridiculous to me. I understand that things happen. I understand that life gets in the way. But I'm not talking about those situations. I'm talking about someone intentionally choosing to manipulate my schedule because they do not want to adhere to it. And they don't want to tell me ahead of time that the schedule doesn't work for them. What does this h

So there's this trick that I noticed that people who "inform" perform. (I know because I've done it too.) First they find your sore spot or emotional wound. Next they present you with information that presses on the sore spot or reopens the emotional wound (or at least attempts to break it back open). Then they get you riled up and emotionally charged. You scream. You argue. You Facebook. You Tweet. You Blog. You converse amongst your friends about the situation. THEN WHAT? I've never been a fan of marching, petitioning, wearing ribbons, etc. I HAVE never been a fan. I don't knock how people choose to fight this way. I just don't fight that way. I recognize the effectiveness of creating awareness. People need to know what's going on in the world. But after they know, THEN WHAT? After you've marched then what? After you've signed the petition or worn the ribbon, then what? And I'm not being facetious, I really would like to know. Do you

Outside of the obvious, there is this underlying problem with self-deception. I remember when I would NOT accept who I was. I remember wanting to be so different that I refused to accept who I actually WAS. Every problem was one that was caused by someone else. Every situation was one that someone got me in to. Every ordeal was generated by something outside of me. Fast forward to the relationship that helped me to begin to change everything. I was in a relationship with my mirror. This man was who I was. He was a liar. He was a cheat. He was an addict. He was irresponsible. He was sweet. He was (somewhat) free. He loved to learn. He was creative. I embraced all the things about him that I embraced in myself. The things in me I didn't even acknowledge, I judged him so very harshly. I made excuses for who I was (and NONE for him). I was the way that I was because of how I was raised or because of something that had to do with someone else. None of this bull I shitted on people'

I realized today that I've never committed myself to a relationship before. I've been in a few yes. I've given myself the impression  tricked myself into believing that I was committed to the relationship yes. Thinking about it retrospectively though, I never was. I say this because I always walked into the relationship with an exit strategy. I've always had a plan of what (or WHO if I'm keeping it real) I was gonna do when things went sour. It wasn't until now that I realize that you can't hold on to a relationship with one foot outside the door. The door can't even be cracked. It has to be closed. The ability to open the door needs to remain but when a commitment is made to a relationship, the door cannot remain open. Having an open door means, to me, that the options for dealing with the inevitable trials and tribulations of the relationship are OUTSIDE of the relationship. When the door is closed, FOR ME, that means I have to use what's in the sp