the great majority of men are bundles of beginnings

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them." - G.B. Shaw

I am going to start this tirade by denouncing success and embracing failure.

If you have never screwed up, if you have never lost, if you have never been utterly denied, then you have not been successful.

First, for arguments sake, we must define "success"... and that for me is easy. I have found that success if nothing else, can only be distinguished on an individual basis. For success is the parallel alignment of ones thoughts and actions and those are not exactly the same for any two people alive. Simply put, it is a world where cognitive dissonance is eliminated.

I don't think success is an end goal, because the achievement of one thing only leads to the void of another. An idealistic success is most beautifully perceived as a journey. A journey where are you doing what you are thinking, and you are thinking about what you're feeling, and they are all complementing each other.

If you have never failed then you have never tried. End of story. Consistency is stealing the vitality out of you one day at a time. The simpleton doesn't risk the 'no', because even though he is not achieving success, he is content that has never failed. To do nothing is often worse a crime than doing the wrong something.

They say the great majority of men are bundles of beginnings. Because, there are no endings in this world. Endings only mark other beginnings, and a failure in one thing is just the beginning of the next endeavor.

Fall down 7 times, get up 8. We know this.

Don't let anybody tempt you into believing otherwise, cause g-d help me they will.

I'm not telling you that we will always get what were after, but if we are earnestly trying, if we are pushing towards that place, then often the feeling we are looking for is found along the way.... and in the fractional chance that it isn't, then at least we can be without regret knowing we gave it our best shot.

Josh Billings asked us to consider the postage stamp... it's sole purpose was to stick on to something until it gets there.

Dorian

Lewis Pugh After Completing the Mount Everest Swim

Just because something has worked in the past so well, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future and similarly, now, before I do anything, I ask myself what type of mindset do I require to successfully complete a task.

I Have Better Things to Fill My Time

I would like to follow up on the previous post. Hope is not required when all is well. Hope is required in times of duress. Why must I ever experience duress? Most of human sufferings is a manifestation of thought. Yes, hope does come from within. Hope is created through thought. Much the same way that everything is created by means of thought. Think of any time you have ever tormented yourself over something menial only to retrospectively realize how ridiculous it was. Internal havoc is created by thought, but a lack thereof is associated with peace.

So many times we hear, "Do what you must now so that you may do what you want later". I am so tired of modeling my life to sculpt and form some future that is correct only in societal views. I want to be an explorer. An explorer of life. And of thought. I look back on my youth and allow my thoughts to create havoc when I realized how I was hoodwinked. To be told, "you can do whatever you want in life", is a hoax. You can do whatever you like in life so long as you attend school, stay grounded, and do as everyone else! I'm done with that.

That is all for now.

Hope & Power

"The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but, rather, an ability to work for something that is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem hopeless as ours do, here and now.

I leave it to those more qualified to decide what can be expected “from above”—that is, from what is happening in the sphere of power. I have never fixed my hopes there; I’ve always been more interested in what was happening “below,” in what could be expected from “below,” what could be won there, and what defended. All power is power over someone, and it always somehow responds, usually unwittingly rather than deliberately, to the state of mind and the behavior of those it rules over. One can always find in the behavior of power a reflection of what is going on “below.” No one can govern in a vacuum. The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: Everyone has a small part of himself in both.

– Václav Havel: "Disturbing the Peace"

Thank You

"Tonight for several hours I sat and thanked every person who has ever really helped me become who I am, who has taught me to be a man, and given me strength. If I die tomorrow I know that everyone I care about knows I love them. I have never felt more peace and more of a man than I do at this very moment."

-Peter "CHE" Pan

People need to be reminded.

They might not know how much the world needs them.

You truly never know when the last chance you will get to tell somebody something will be. Make sure you do it now. Life is too short to be anything less than real.

Thank you for being you.

Shine On

"There is something about yourself that you don't know. Something that you will deny even exists, until it's too late to do anything about it. It's the only reason you get up in the morning. The only reason you suffer the shitty puss, the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. Fear or revere me, but please, think I'm special. We share an addiction. We're approval junkies. We're all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The hip-hip-hoo-fuckin' rah. Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on you crazy diamond, because we're just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others..."

-Jake Green in "Revolver"

All I can do is be me, whoever that is

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

-Henri Nouwen

How can we truly know ourselves, let alone someone else?

I do believe everybody has a story to tell, I don't care who you are. How could you not? The real question is if these stories are all of equal value? Unfortunately, there is not enough time to decide that nor is there time to hear them all... and besides, we have ourselves to figure out.

So what does that make a friendship? If we don't know somebody completely then are they really a friend or just a season in our life? A beautiful friendship an everlasting summer, and a breakup a harsh winter? I think it's safe to say that companionship with someone else is a essentially an act of faith. When you meet somebody we jump head first into their story, and they into ours.

Sometimes it takes a relationship with someone else to learn more about yourself and how we can affect others for better or for worse.

We are always learning about the people around us and ourself, and if we never stop learning, than we never stop growing.

To never know oneself is entirely different than being happy with ones self, we can be very happy with the way we feel about ourselves and our decisions now. Do not be mistaken about that.

In a world where we are never finished knowing ourselves, I guess we can never finish knowing someone else, because there is so many different lights for a person to be seen in that we may never see them all.

So to answer the question at large, do we ever really know someone?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Do we need to?

I don't think so.

We don't know absolutely everything about any of the people we know, but that doesn't mean we can't love them for what we do know. Happiness isn't getting what you want, its loving what you have.