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  • Your intentions are never enough

    Your intentions are never enough

    There is often an unintended entitlement that sets in for those who are trying to make up for the impact of their behaviour on others.

    The entitlement comes through in how we expect our efforts to be received.

    If we apologise, we expect it to be accepted.

    If we comfort, we expect them to feel comforted.

    If we hug them, we expect them to hug us back.

    The one who causes the offence does not get to decide how the offended must forgive or understand.

    Until we connect with this reality, we will continue to downplay the impact that we have on others while believing that they just don’t understand or don’t care about how difficult it is for us.

    When we caused harm, it stops being about us and starts being about those we harmed.

    If we are sincere in our convictions to make right what we did wrong, we won’t feel entitled to our efforts being accepted. Instead, we’ll be focused on being more effective in our efforts to make things right.

    That test of our conviction is what many fail, resulting in the offenders parading as victims and the offended being painted as unreasonable or cruel.

    Check yourself when you apologise or try to make up for something you did wrong.

    If you don’t, you will sour important relationships for all the wrong reasons while blaming them for your actions.

  • What if balance is what bores us to search for life?

    What if balance is what bores us to search for life?

    When we focus on the gift, we lose sight of the giver. Similarly, when we focus on the kindness that we need, or the privilege that we claim, we lose sight of the human expected to provide it.

    Harshness and brutality are meted out daily in ways that appear non-violent and even passive. But it is cloaked in emotions and customs. Cultural norms have destroyed divine wisdom, and divine instruction has become the corporal punishment of cultural compliance.

    The most vile behaviour always attracts the most attention, but simultaneously offers the greatest distraction. For those who wish to get away with murder, sensationalism about anything else serves them well. The distractedness of the masses in their militant vocalisation of every injustice that they encounter feels like protest or like fighting for the cause of justice. Tragically, they don’t realise that they are simply tools to enable the distractions that allow the brutality and true oppression to charge on without meaningful resistance.

    Our distraction, fuelled by sincere conviction in everything that we believe is non-negotiable feeds the cycle of control that plagues us. Rebellion must be focused if it is to yield justice. Otherwise, it simply replaces one injustice with another. But mobs don’t yield to discipline. Thus, the one who spurs on the mob is the one in control of the agenda.

    The contemplation of reality aimed at making sense of at least some of it has been a tiring and often futile endeavour. It has coloured my canvas with whimsical hope and unreal fancies that imposed an expectation on some who had no idea that I existed beyond the words that I shared.

    Too many take comfort without considering the comforter. Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t all equally distracted, some focused on the distractedness of others while not realising that such focus distracts them from their own purposeful convictions.

    Balance is an ever engaging plight. It requires a cooperation between souls who seldom see each other equally, either in plain sight or in understanding. Love is found and lost in such moments. Seeing beauty in another while they see it not in themselves. And if they have such blindness of the self, how are they ever to see the beauty in the one who beholds them?

    Life is a relentless pursuit of creating order out of chaos in the hope of finding a peaceful fulfilment that feels divinely sublime and intriguingly connected.

    Faith is contradicted by its very endeavour because its endeavour spawns fears of failure which counteract faith. Yet another elusive balance.

    Perhaps life is imbalance. What if balance is what bores us to search for life?

  • Good intentions are not enough

    Good intentions are not enough

    Believing in the universe waiting to serve you is no different than believing that the world revolves around your every need.

    Good intentions do not automatically result in beneficial outcomes. In fact, it too often results in harm.

    There’s a reason for the popularity of that old proverb that says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

    Understand why your methods may not be effective in achieving what you intend to achieve, and you’ll find yourself less reliant on whispering to the universe and more confident in owning your life.

    Good intentions are never enough.

    Never have been enough.

    Never will be enough.

    Until you are willing to own the methods, the behaviours, the actions that you carry out to fulfil your intentions, you’ll always have reason to believe that life is working against you, or that others don’t appreciate you. Etc.

    Own your life before it owns you.



  • Do you remember your dream?

    Do you remember your dream?

    What will you be when you give up?

    Sadly, too many live their lives this way resulting in them imposing their expectations on their children to fulfil the dreams that they abandoned.

    Every generation complains about the generation before them and loses sight of such behaviour giving the next generation reason to complain about them.

    We’re a strange bunch.

    We distract ourselves with emotions and abandon practicality, then distort our practical efforts to reclaim our emotions.

    If you lose sight of what is magical in the present moment, you’ll eventually convince yourself that you’re just a dreamy romantic when you find yourself speaking longingly of all the amazing opportunities that you sacrificed to create some life for others.

    Meanwhile, it was an effort to protect yourself from failure or rejection that caused you to sacrifice your dreams, and not any purposeful duty.

    Dreams will remain dreams if there is no purposeful conviction behind it.

    It’s possible to integrate your efforts towards your dreams with the practical life that you must live.

    In fact, it’s essential. How else are our children supposed to experience such conviction about the value of this single life that we have if all they ever witness is the drudgery of labour and duty?

    Can you even recall what dreams you abandoned in favour of acceptance or validation from those around you?

    Strike a balance before the imbalance ravages your peace.

  • Authentic gratitude

    Authentic gratitude

    This is for the ‘attitude of gratitude’ crowd.

    It’s for the ones who believe that gratitude is an act.

    A gesture.

    A token word of appreciation.

    A polite mannerism.

    A show of acknowledgement.

    A gift prompted by an event.

    It’s not.

    Authentic gratitude is what you do and how you show up for those whom you claim to appreciate on those special occasions.

    Gratitude is about valuing what is important to those whom you claim to value.

    It is about what you do with the privilege and favour enabled by those who serve and/or support you.

    Gratitude is a state of being.

    It is a way of life.

    It is a way of living without deliberately trying.

    It is a consequence of the belief in the virtue and the goodness of what benefit you are capable of being to those around you, not because they deserve it but because you’re capable of it.

    Authenticity is rare.

    That’s why most use gestures and expressions of gratitude as a commodity with which to transact for significance.

    Appreciation is not gratitude.

    Gratitude is reflected in what you do with, or about what you claim to appreciate.

    You cannot be truly grateful for others if you take yourself for granted.

  • Do you really love yourself?

    Do you really love yourself?

    What does ingratitude towards yourself look like?

    I think it looks like this…

    You focus on your aesthetic to feel better about your internal conversation.

    You live loud with everything you do and possess because you’re concerned about how others perceive you.

    You beat yourself up in private, but present yourself as confident and bold in public.

    You over compensate to make space for people who treat you as an option, but go out of your way to exclude people who have high expectations of you.

    You comfort yourself by preempting how others may judge you by telling yourself that they don’t know what you’ve been through.

    You withhold your contribution of support or assistance if you don’t think others deserve it.

    Your internal conversation is harsh resulting in health issues that you then use to seek pity from those around you for your self-imposed struggle.

    You try to save others from your opinion of their lives believing that you’re doing it because you’re a good person, while not realising that you’re projecting your struggle onto them so that you can feel valued.

    You take your time and your comforts for granted, always procrastinating on your own goals but over investing in assisting others to achieve their goals.

    You see self-sacrifice without healthy boundaries as a virtuous way of life, and lose sight of the impact of such behaviour on your health and wellbeing, and on those who care about you.

    If you find yourself growing angry or agitated at this list, chances are, you are feeling judged or attacked.

    That’s a clear sign of how much the opinions of others about you holds more weight than your opinion of yourself.

    A healthy self-worth is not a narrative. It’s not an internal dialogue. Nor is it a set of tools or methods.

    A healthy self-worth is a state of being, and is only recognised in hindsight.

    It is only through reflecting on how we handled situations that we are able to consciously determine if that is true to who we are or not.

    If not, we focus on understanding what drove us towards such behaviour so that we become aware of the reasons for our behaviour rather than simply judging ourselves for behaving in that way.

    Awareness is the critical step towards self improvement.

    And self improvement is impossible if every piece of criticism or negative feedback makes you defensive.

  • Break the stigma

    Break the stigma

    I think it was Dr Wayne Dyer who said that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

    This is true both positively and negatively.

    Do you know someone who has a problem for every solution? Who sees doom and gloom at the happiest of moments? Who is preempting a negative outcome despite things going in their favour?

    Do you think they have a mental illness, or have they just been hurt so many times before, that they are afraid to hope for a positive outcome? Are they simply protecting themselves from being let down again?

    This is how we experience life when we finally give up hope about the future, or we give up hope about being appreciated.

    That absence of hope is what causes us to feel depressed. Depression is a legitimate experience of human emotions after we’ve taken one too many hard knocks from life about something important to us.

    The same is true for every other emotional experience.

    Emotions are not deficiencies. They’re the essence of what makes us human.

    If we ever hope to win this battle against a consistently declining quality of life, we need to stop referring to emotions as mental health, and we need to stop defining the duress that we experience in life as a mental illness.

    We need to reconnect with the human behind the pain, instead of dehumanising them by denying the legitimacy of their emotional experience.

    Break the stigma. Stop the labelling. Embrace the humanness.

  • Procrastination is not a mental illness

    Procrastination is not a mental illness

    For the sake of your sanity, do not buy into this extremely flawed way of thinking.

    If you were to believe the mainstream tripe about mental health, you’d be running back to your childhood for everything and blaming your parents for all your failures in life.

    The irony of this claim about procrastination and laziness is that they both have a very simple, yet easy to overcome root cause.

    You either believe in the value of what you’re doing, or you don’t.

    If you don’t, the only reason you will do it is because there will be unpleasant consequences if you don’t do it. That’s why we leave things until we have no choice but to do it when we approach it as if it’s a punishment for living.

    It’s this same reason that inspires us to look forward to our day, or to drag ourselves out of bed, regardless of how much sleep we got the night before.

    The reasons for struggling to see the value in doing something requires self awareness and mindfulness.

    But given that both are lost when we blame our past for our present failings, we further sabotage our efforts to connect with life in a more meaningful way.

    Please, for the love of sanity and common sense, stop buying into the mindless crap presented as research about mental health.

    Give yourself a fighting chance by simply understanding why you have good reason in your own mind to be averse to doing things that you know will be beneficial for you.

    We’ve overcomplicated life and then reframed that complexity to be mental health.

    We need to reclaim our humanness and the very real human experiences that give us reason to feel emotional duress from time to time.

    It’s all part of being human.