Recently, if you followed my social media at all, I’ve been through a heavy shitstorm of challenges and just all-around bad news and bad luck. I’ve been fighting to push through to get back to my old self, to try on gratitude and a growth mindset about it all. It’s been near impossible, but then one day something snapped into place. It was after I created some visual reminders in my journal about the “big picture” of my life and the challenge of “leveling up” in one’s life.
I was sitting in the gym and the personal pain that was near making me want to give it all up was gone. I saw none of the attacks or the setbacks mattered to the bigger picture and the bigger goals of my life. Joy filled me again! It was like a curse was lifted. As if I passed a test. I was down but I wasn’t out.
Covid didn’t devastate me. People did. I’m not sure how I will come back from it but I know now none of what they did mattered to them as much as it did to me. Unfortunately, that puts the weight on me to let go of it because they don’t care either way. To see, unfortunately, these were not people of value but rather focus on the people and blessings in my life that are of value.
I remember feeling this great sense of doom that I could almost hear it as a prophecy for myself and the world. It kept repeating itself and as more trouble came, it only confirmed the mantra going on in my head. Doom, doom, doom. I didn’t know how to escape it and I was fortunate someone did something almost every day to cheer me up a little to bring me out of it, but that still made me dependent on others. It wasn’t till I got journaling and got within that I could muster my own strength and vision.
Cheri Huber in her book that I read every summer called ‘There is Nothing Wrong With You‘ says, “Belief in fairness is a set-up for self-hate…it’s the old ‘why do bad things happen to good people'”. She states that it is easy for us to move into questions as to what did I do wrong from that place and the ego goes deeper and deeper until the ego itself demands you do what it says to protect yourself “or else”. Or else what?
Huber says believing in the threat alone is “the else”. It is the worst thing that can happen because you are ‘believing in your own inadequacy. Believing that you are not equal to your life. Turning away from your True Nature, Heart and Living.”
When I was let go recently from my job, my employer’s lazy and crude communication felt like an attack and a slap in the face to me. The reasoning behind and the entire processing was poorly done, flimsy at best and the worst timing. A kick in the nuts after all the work and heart I put in the company and the relationship I had built with their staff. But on their end, I was but a pog in a wheel. They were doing the least they had to do to move me out so they could put someone else in my place. They didn’t care. I cared because I valued my work and invested myself in it. They did not.
And the little voices creep in about how worthless you are, and what a fool you were. Huber makes this great statement and puts it on a page all on its own:
If A Voice Is Not Speaking Compassionately
It Doesn’t Have Anything To Tell You
Everything You Need To Know Will Come
From A Place Of Compassion
After that slap in the face, after that betrayal, are we to think that nothing matters? Is that the answer then to true happiness? I was thinking about that today. What does really matter in this life? There are people who say nothing does, so live drink, and be merry. Screw it, tomorrow we die. Others believe in an afterlife and others know that they know that they know God, like their best friend.
I don’t have an 100% answer but I do know this: What we do and how we live our lives matter. For example, we would not have a Democracy in the United States if brave men and women didn’t sacrifice their lives for us today. Someone invented the computer you are using to read this. Maybe there is someone special in your life that is important to you. Countries, States, families and individuals, and our very planet is impacted by the mark each of us make. This sometimes is hard to see in our day-to-day lives or in things we do or talents we have that go unrecognized. This blog isn’t hugely popular and my books are not blockbusters by any stretch. I haven’t become the writer I dreamed to be. Often, many of us aren’t living our dreams.
We look at children and can see the genetics of parents passed onto children and there is some hope of life continuing on for that family line. That is a wonderful joy to feel, to have, and to know. I’ve been in the middle of that and felt it with my nieces and nephews. But as a single gay man, I won’t know it as in having my own children birthed of my own. Not that I couldn’t have gotten a surrogate to do that, I just didn’t. I had planned on a partner, time slipped away, and here we are. Does it matter? It matters to me. I feel a part of me won’t live on and this could be the only form of eternal life there is–the passing of my genes. Who knows. Jesus said many mysterious things. I don’t know.
What I do know about the spirit is God is love. There is a love force and sometimes I wonder if all these religious figures egos just got ahead of themselves because they tapped into it and thought they were a God themselves. I mean, when you do tap into spiritual love force, it is STRONG. I dare anyone argue with me that someone in an uneducated or in a religious orthodox society who tapped into that kind of energy might ponder that they are sent by God. I connected to it writing this piece. What you see here is coming from this Spirit.
However, it also feels at times like God is missing. And that is something where each religion comes into fill in the story about it. But, in the real now all we will ever know for sure is we do matter and what we do makes a difference. Maybe not everything we desire that we do. But the ONLY thing that really matters is the bigger picture of your life and where YOU are headed and the people supporting you to get there. The others are lessons on letting go of ego, attachments, and distractions from learning the lessons of this Spirit of Love. So, it seems anyway!
Jamison's Writing Jams 