Tag Archives: choice

Lose New Years Resolutions Find Year Long Intentions

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I am guessing like most people, you have defined your resolutions for the next year. How do they feel?  Most likely your resolutions are maintenance type resolutions to take care of something with your physical self.

Resolutions such as losing weight, quitting something, or exercising more are common resolutions that are made each New Year. These resolutions are for the most part hollow, and generally groundless.

New Years resolutions are rarely followed over the whole year. The first days and weeks resolutions are fresh and part each days focus. As weeks three, four and beyond arrive, resolutions that were made so firmly, start sliding down the what is important today scale.

Should any of these resolutions really have been be made? Are any of these resolutions really important in life? Are those resolutions only space fillers or place holders, forgotten by the end of the month? Most importantly, do resolutions make anyone feel good way inside where it counts?

Perhaps it is time to make real choices that mean something, and will potentially make a real difference each and every day of the next year, and every year after. I suggest my rule of three to help make real resolutions. This rule of three creates a timeline of the year. Use the rule of three to split the year into: this week, this month, and this year.

Instead of making resolutions, add value to your life this year and create intentions. An intention is to have a course of action, resolution is simply finding a solution but not acting on it. When creating your intentions, make intentions having a path making real changes in your life.

Pretend it is possible this next year may be the last year you will be alive. If the idea of this next year being your last year alive is scary, think about people you knew or heard of, who thought they would be here this year, making yet another list of resolutions to be forgotten after a few weeks. Being alive means accepting we may be one of those people that someone alive pauses to think about this time next year.

Now that resolutions are out and intention is in, it is time to take the next step. Look at your next week, starting tomorrow, the day after, or whatever day you pick as the start of your week. What can you do to make a real difference in your life that will make you feel and those around you feel good? What will you intend for the next month that can not be done in a week? What will you intend for the remainder of what may be your last year that you can not do in a day or a month? What changes can you bring into your life that will actually mean something.

Here is my New Years rule of three. What are you going to intend for the next week? What are you going to intend for the next month? What are you going to intend for the next year? Thinking in this way is acknowledging our mortality, and focusing our intentions in manageable periods. Combined in this manner intention becomes a powerful reality, and a life tool everyone can use.

Each of our lives are unique, as are our life situations. Below are some suggestions of what you may wish to intend in your life. Intention will improve your life, and the lives of all who will enter and leave your life next week, month, and year. Read these thoughts over and change them for use in your life or use them as starting points for totally new intents in your life.

Resolutions are generally weak and lead to yet another failure on the list of many. Thought out meaningful intentions are powerful life changing tools which make you grateful to be finally alive.

Here are some thoughts to help create intention for your personal use:  Tell a parent, sibling, or friend what you really want to tell them; Find out peoples names who are peripheral in your life, and tell them how they change your life for the better by doing what they do; Be grateful and respectful to the once living things that are now your food; Learn about a people or culture you know nothing about; Learn more about your spiritual self.

Learn more about your religion and why you believe what you do; Read autobiographies, listen to audio books, or watch movies about people you admire; Learn another persons culture and beliefs; Create quiet time to be outside; Buy, plant, and care for a plant(s); Plant or place a potted flower in a needy public place and take care of it; Find someone you can help each _; Attend a church you have never been to; Eat a meal of food you have never eaten; Talk to strangers, strangers have something important to tell you about your life right now, ask them what it is. Look for ways to make a difference in someone’s life.

Here is an easy to remember thought: ‘To be resolute is to be unwavering, to intend is to have action and purpose. I create my life with intent.’

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Scientology verses the right to believe what we choose

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I was reading some online threads this morning about an actor who is also a Scientologist. There was an article about him and his then new found religion, and then the many comments that followed. I read the words fanatic, lunatic, and some other rather colorful descriptions of this person’s conversion to a belief system that makes sense to them.

I read a book put out by the founder of Scientology a number of years ago, and I have to admit, at the time it did not make a lot of sense and appeared to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. That being said, the belief system was already established, and my opinion of it accounts for little, as it still does.

Perhaps if I reread the book now, I am sure I would have a different viewpoint of Scientology. As I have learned over the years, the world is not always what it seems once you scratch the surface and actually look at what is going on, instead of ‘knowing’ what is going on in the world. Things are quite a bit different when one takes the time to observe what they see rather than simply placing what they think they saw into what they believe to be true.

Back to Scientology, I fail to see why there are so many strong feelings about this belief system? I thought maybe it was the name, Scientology, which I do not think you can find many people who would say Scientology sounds religious. So the word, Scientology does not sound very religious in nature so people could be upset about someone believing in something that does not sound religious. People have attacked other people both verbally and physically over a lot less.

Scientology sounds really foreign, way beyond some of those vague eastern religions. I think those ‘vague’ eastern religions are more tolerated because they have been around for a while, and were not invented within the last fifty years or so. This makes them more established, and possibly more acceptable because someone did not just invent them.

In defense of Scientology itself, a belief system sometimes takes on a life of its own. We grow up and are told what to believe and how to perform whatever rituals come with that belief system. When we grow older and realize there are other ways of perceiving in respect to a belief system other than what we were taught. If we are open to possibility it becomes obvious that most other belief systems have the same end goal in mind that our belief system does. Other belief systems simply they just go about arriving at the same end differently. This usually happens because they come from a culture different from ours and they have a different way of viewing the world.

Then there is the question of the actor himself. We determined a long time ago that people have the right to believe as they deem proper for themselves. That does not mean that someone can only have a belief system that meets within the narrow scope of approval of another person’s idea of what is a proper belief system.

People are free to believe what they want as long as it does no harm to others. If Scientology is a person’s belief system, we have no right, and we should have no public opinion on whether it meets our own standards or not. That is not something we as individuals have the right to decide for other people. As the popular saying goes, or at least as well as I remember it, “I don’t have to agree with your beliefs, but I will defend them to te death.

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Two years, two jobs, and fired from one!

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During the summer of after high school, and before college, I was working hard to have enough money to pay for my upcoming college adventure. I was smart enough to get in college, but not smart enough to get a free ride. I had been working as a bag boy for a grocery store for almost two years by this time. A big step up from previous jobs held as a kid.

The work was okay, it was sort of boring, but it paid better than most jobs I could get so I stayed with it for those two years. The manager of the grocery store though never really seemed to like me. I never knew why, perhaps my personality was a little to colorful for a grocery store worker.

As I had graduated, I decided that as I was going to school full time, and working almost full time, I could now take on a second job. It would double up my money in a few months, and then it was college, so it seemed like a good idea. I went looking for a second job. I was up front with my boss about it, and of course he was not too pleased. He told me that was fine, but my first obligation was to the job I currently had.

I found a job as a dishwasher on a local military base and it paid more than what I was making bagging groceries. It was sixteen hours, two days a week, on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I took the job, as there was no problem with the schedule I was on which was Monday through Friday, mornings and afternoons…. When I told my grocery store boss I found a job that did not interfere with my current schedule, and was only two days a week, I thought he would be okay with it.

How naive I was to think that it was not a problem. On the second week of working two jobs, I came in and checked my grocery store work schedule, only to discover that I was now working Saturday and Sunday days. I went to my boss, explained again I was saving money for college, and I could work any schedule during the week except Saturday and Sunday. Of course that was a problem for him. I mentioned again that I had already spoken to him before this second job, and thought I was clear about what I could work.

The boss turned it into an ultimatum, and told me if I was not here Saturday morning there would be problems. Me being me, I told him I would not be there Saturday morning and he should start looking for someone to work Saturday, and Sunday in my place. I needed money for college, and I thought he was being totally unfair. Of course that is exactly what he did. When I came in to work following the weekend, he gave me my paycheck and told me I was fired.

I thought that was the end of my college world, what would I do for money now as there were only a few months to make any before my school started. As luck would have it, they liked my work on the base, and once they heard my predicament they made it possible for me to work full time as a dishwasher food line helper!

After all these years, I never have understood what the problem was with my grocery store boss. It was possible that the boss knowing I was leaving at the end of summer decided to cut his losses and get a new kid hooked on money during the summer when the pressure of working and school was not there.

Or, it was possibly, he never liked me, and wanted me gone, but I never did anything bad enough to be fired. I always, and many future bosses agreed, I am a good person to have in their business, whatever business it was. At any rate, life goes on, though on days like today, I ponder what was the real reason he did what he did, being fairly sure he knew what the outcome would be.

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Change, not stagnation does do you good

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One of the interesting aspects of life that I find, is second chances. A second chance is almost planned into our lives by default or so it seems. It starts I suppose with our potty training as babies and continues on throughout our lives until we finally pass on. Some of us even have repeat the death experience, getting a second chance. Perhaps we are not as much a bystander in our own passing as it appears from the sidelines.

Some people I have noticed never use their second chance. They are too timid, or too something to even use their first chance. It seems they miss out on so much in life. It has to be something they develop after their formal schooling is complete. No one is let out of school because they quit trying after failing the third grade, or any grade for that matter. We are forced to keep on trying until either someone feels sorry for us and passes us, or we finally learn those things we need to learn to go on the next grade.

What I am not to sure of is when and how we start not trying, or giving up before we have to. There are so many people around me who have have worn the same style of clothing all their adult life, have never taken a risk, or have refused to taste a food that their Mom didn’t feed them as babies. In short they have never taken a risk that they were not forced into and had no choice but to take.

What happened in the life of someone who just stops in their late teens and never tries anything new again? What could possibly have happened that was so terrible that they choose never to do anything different than what they do already. I can not imagine something so painful that people stop and if they can help it life never changes again.

I think that would be such a dull confining world, especially in the friends, and romance department. Friends are rarely forever as much as we would like them to be. Unfortunately life changes whether we like it too or not, and friends do too. We move, move on, take on new interests, get married, get divorced, the list goes on and on. Friends move, spouses wake up and decide the life they are living is not for them any longer, and they leave. For whatever reason these adverse to risk people go on without trying to change their situation.

The same problem I see happening daily with our career choices. It is a uncommon today to know someone that has worked the same job all their working career. Companies grow, grow old, are bought up or simply stop being. Changes in the way things are done make some jobs obsolete. Changes in peoples thinking make other jobs fade away. I remember when the wearing of furs was a sign of prosperity. Now it’s in very bad taste to walk down the street covered in some animal’s skin.

How do people who refuse to change, or try something new adapt? Is it a life stressor for them to have their schedule interrupted by something they had no control over? Are they okay with making changes in their life only if they are forced into it? Or perhaps they just omit from their day that portion of life that no longer exits? They simply go into a holding pattern of doing nothing in that time when they used to do something?

Very few of us really like change. For the most part we like our world to be comfortable and predictable. We enjoy our schedules, calendars, and routine. Then again when most of us have to change, we grit our teeth, steel our nerves and do what has to be done. Perhaps there is a benefit to the human race, always having a few people on each end of the spectrum, and most of us clumped in the middle. I just may not have noticed it yet.

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Unhappy with your life? Change your mind then

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To see the way our minds shape our reality is really something to behold! I often wonder how many people really understand just how much we create and control our world around us? For many people, I think when something good happens they feel lucky. On the other hand when something bad happens they feel unlucky. In the more extreme cases a few people feel life or something in it is out to get them.

I remember many times when I was out walking the streets of places I had never been to before, where one or more people have told me after the fact, they would never walk down those streets by themselves because they are just too dangerous. For myself, I went out in those areas with the thought that the people living there were just like me, and they were trying to do the best they could for their own lives using what they had to work with.

In all my years of wandering in places where the more cautious would not go, I only had a problem once, and I brought that on myself. I have walked into some of the slums of south Chicago, Gary, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Minneapolis, Munich, and Seoul, and never had a problem, even though I had been lost more than once into areas where I clearly did not fit in

In south Chicago, there were two men at my departure point. One said to the other, twenty he doesn’t, and the other said okay. I thought nothing of it as I completed my one mile walk to a place where a cab could find me. When I returned the same two men were there, and one was giving the other money. I asked what the money was for. The man told me it was a bet on whether or not I would be murdered before I made it to a cab….

It is a perfect example of how people in the same neighborhood can have completely different expectations about how their life is, and they can both be correct. In almost any city in the country, in any neighborhood, life for the most part is how the individual perceives it. When we choose only to see gangs and violence, that is what we see. When we choose to see a drug riddled neighborhood, that is what we find.

On the other hand, if we expect to find good people trying their best to live a good life, that is what we will find. If we believe we are alone, we find loneliness, if we see the world as a friendly helpful place, we find goodness. Of course there are places that are exceptions, because the world that exists there has been in place so long, and the peoples minds so beaten down, that no other type of thought can penetrate the thinking of the people in that area. Short of a major life altering event, their perceptions and existence will never change.

Our minds operate like this for us in all our states, both conscious, unconscious, awake, and asleep. We are the creators of our world, and whatever we choose to think, our mind goes to work to start creating that world for us. It happens in a way we never notice, but it happens just the same.

We create our own world around us, therefore we can also change our world any time we wish. Rarely does something happen without our allowing it too or even anticipating it happening. As an extreme example, think about someone addicted to drugs.

At some point in time earlier in their life, they had to make a decision about their world. An offer of trying a hard drug appeared in their life and they had to decide if that was a life change they wanted or not. At some level they decided they wanted to go down that path. We need to be good stewards of our own life and ensure the life we envision is the life we want to live. If there is conflict between our vision and our life, we can change it.

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Dreams come true from well formed plans

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If my memory has not jumbled this story up…In one of Carlos Castaneda’s early books, Don Juan tells Castaneda that a witch down the road is planning to attack him, and he needs to stop her before she hurts him. Castaneda is scared, and does not know what to do. Don Juan plays on those fears and drives Castaneda to take some action concerning the witch down the road. Later on, if I have the sequence correct, Castaneda asks Don Juan what he would do if he were on a street, in a city and there was a man with a rifle waiting to kill him. Don Juan laughs, and say’s something to the effect of, he would not be on that street to start with.

Unlike the enemy Don Juan may have created, many of us are our own assassins. We rarely need anyone’s help to ruin our plans. We do it ourselves with some frequency. We meet someone special, we want a different job, any number of things that we start to plan out, and suddenly it all blows up without warning. Or does it? In Castaneda’s book, Don Juan said he would not be on the street to start with. What could Don Juan know that we do not?

Don Juan knew many things about human nature that most do not, and this was only one of them. Don Juan knew that many of us we get stuck in a rut we call our life. We claim we do not like where how we live, what we do, and talk about how we are going to change. Changing, and talking about changing are two completely different things. I think that is what Don Juan knew. Unless, as in Castaneda’s case where he really felt his very life was threatened, he would have normally taken no action to help himself.

I listened to a couple eating at a fast food place last week. They were poor, looking at their clothing which was worn, and frayed. The man was telling the woman that he was planning on going to Las Vegas, to gamble, and become rich. He went on to say that it would probably take him about a year and a half to get rich. He thought she could stay where she was until he returned. Of course when he returned things may have changed. She would probably be on Welfare. Possibly hooked up with another guy (his words). What would he do then? Would she be willing to leave the guy to be with him once he returned rich? Perhaps he would run into a women, and he would not want her any more – that also was possible (his words). With the conversation half finished, and bristling with possibilities, they left.

As crazy as that conversation sounds, some of us make plans like that all the time. We dream our plans, and never live our dream, because something falls apart. For that couple, I doubt he will ever find his way out of town, let alone to Las Vegas. Not because he was not capable, but because his plans are built on the same sand of everyones who’s plans blow up without reason. They are not really plans, they are simply a string of events tied together by hot air.

We all need dreams in our life. We also need good planning so we can have the best possible life. I think we need to keep the two somewhat separate so we can achieve our dreams, instead of dreaming about our achievements that have never come to pass. We are capable of so much more if we give our self a chance with real plans, and realistic dreams.

As an old dinner house cook once told me. Plan your work, work you plan, and clean up as you go. In the case of our lives, it would be: Plan your dream, work your plan, and repeat as you go. Happy dreaming!

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